Do You See Trading As Fun and Games?

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“One thing very good traders have is insight into themselves.” – Chris Tate

FUN AND GAMES
Recently Louise Bedford and I have been doing the Short Term Trading Magic seminars in a few places and it has been sometime since I did any form of presentation on a semi regular basis. As such it has been interesting to observe people as they work through various trading issues.

One of the things I have noted is that people take trading far too seriously and this is reflected in a form of desperation. Desperation is the antithesis of the state of mind you need to be in to trade effectively.

There is no deny that this is a phase everyone enters at some stage in their career but to be successful you need to move beyond this and begin to treat trading as the game that it is. Once I started treating trading as a game then it became so much easier on the soul and my results reflected this. I even have a t-shirt that says that the fewer fucks I give the more I make.

This is not to say that I am reckless but rather that I am in no way wedded to the outcome of any trade. At its core my life will not change if a trade or even a cluster of trades are winners or losers – they are simply not that important. When compared to real life, trading is nowhere near as important as people think it is.

It is often commented that children are better are learning new things than adults who seem set in their ways. I am not so certain that this is a reflection of any great cognitive superiority or plasticity that the young may have but rather a reflection of their willingness to be both wrong and to play. Young children have no ego therefore the mistakes that their play generate have no impact upon their sense of self-worth. As adults we lose this resilience because we believe that it is somehow catastrophic to our self-image if we do make mistakes.

But in trading your mistakes are your own – no one else can see them so you are insulated from the judgment of others. This isolation gives you the freedom to be wrong but the only thing you have to cope with is your own judgment.

Markets are a wonderful universes for exploration and for play. The presence of micro contracts in various instruments and online trading mean that you experiment very cheaply.

The price of admission to the fun park is much lower than it used to be and the number of rides has gone through the roof. It is a shame that more traders don’t view trading as little more than a theme park where you can play to your heart’s content and during the process of playing you learn much more than you would if you were consumed by seriousness and desperation.

Author: Chris Tate

Article reproduced with kind permission of: Tradinggame.com.au

More trading quotes are below:

“To my way of thinking trading is an internal endeavour – there is no external enemy who you can deceive or overpower since markets only exist in the most ephemeral way inside your head. Markets may appear to be physical constructs but they are largely an illusion, trading occurs inside your head where your own perceptions and distortions of reality influence your decision making.” – Chris Tate

“The one thing you shouldn’t feel pressured about is trading. If you do feel that way, you probably need to take a step back and reassess. Pressured trade(r)s don’t make good trade(r)s.” – Joe Ross