How to get an edge at virtually anything, including trading
I probably could drop "virtually" from the title of this article and it would still be true, but as a scientist by training I tend to allow a possibility that I may not be correct. Which, by the way, is a really bad habit if you are also in the business of marketing things.
It pretty much eliminates 80% of potential customers, leaving me with the 20% who actually appreciate my attention to small things like that instead of coming at them with a full-blown hypestration. "Stration," according to Wikipedia "can be described as something that starts small and grows pretty fast," but "hypestration" is a new word that I just invented and I should probably trademark it before a competitor steals it from me and trademarks it himself. Thieves, these days ...
But I digress.
The point is, this applies to everything, save for things that probably don't matter anyway, so we don't even have to include them in the list of things this applies to.
Yes, this too applies to trading, and it can be of tremendous importance and impact. It can make or break you, especially if you are a discretionary trader. And especially if you are a day trader. And even more so if you day trade futures.
Allow me to get to the point.
This edge is, as you might have guessed by now, the mental edge.
It's universal, as I tried to say above. It sure applies to trading, in addition to the edge that derives from the strategy and your mastery of it.
This edge can be gained in two basic ways: by boosting your brain power (rev it up, baby!) and hence improving the brain focus, and by reducing your stress levels.
How to do it, then?
Well, there is certainly more than one way to do so when it comes to enhancing the brain power, even for a short period of time, long enough to take a few e-mini futures trades. I have my own ways too, and some of them I plan to share on the trading forum I am about to launch.
It turns out that some simple things, when properly combined, can be quite powerful. I have discovered one such thing, particularly powerful, and upon doing web research I was positively surprised that it is was not known better. However, the fact that it is known to some (very few, I suspect), means that I am not the only one who responds well to this thing, which assures me that its strength is real and not merely due to the placebo effect. I have definitely experienced a boost in productivity, which is, of course, due to the better functioning brain.
I have also been keenly interested in the ways that can help lessen stress. If you are a trader, you need to be able to deal with stress better than most people out there for whom this is not always a serious issue. But many other people can benefit from it too. Again, virtually everyone, to some extent, at least. That's also something I want to address on the forum, and at some length. I want to make it an important subject.
Have you noticed how little the issue of the mental edge is being explored on trading forums, as if to confirm my view that trading forums rarely discuss what matters for traders?
If this implies that they are not as useful to those who aspire to make money trading as they may seem, don't blame me for that, but that is what I believe to be the case, probably because most people who hang out there are clueless wannabes. But it is not the clueless wannabes that really make trading forums the joke that they are. It is the clueless who act as if they knew something about trading. In other words, posers or phonies. Sometimes, clearly deranged. I disccused this issue in some detail in another article or even two, so I am not going to revisit it here.
The point of this article is to emphasize that there is more than one component to the edge on the trading battlefield. Moreover, that one of these components may be sometimes, if not often, overlooked, perhaps because it is truly universal, so much so that it pretty much stares in your face. It is easy to overlook things like that because we are used to seeking things that are much less obvious, much more obscure.
It is about time to make this issue much more important, because it rightfully deserves to be so. The forum I am about to launch will try to make it happen.
At least one of the things I will want to focus on can literally be life transforming, whether you are trader or not. I do mean it when I say so, and I invite everyone to examine this on their own and to see that I am prepared to back this up with plenty of evidence attesting to how transformative this can be.
Posted on October 9th, 2014.