Sociobiologists describe the formative years in the development of the human brain as the era of evolutionary adaptation. This was a period of hundreds of thousands and even millions of years in which the law of natural selection shaped and molded our brains into the marvelous workings of the adaptation that we now enjoy. Unfortunately […]
Category: Creativity
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Kipling’s Jungle Books metaphor in trading
I have written in previous articles about the power of metaphor in trading. Our evolutionary brain makes powerful use of analogy to reason about new situations to find effective behavior. To see in a flash that this situation is like that situation and that what worked for success over there might work over here is […]
Reflecting on the source of qualitative judgement
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: the psychology of Grail seekers
How you think about the activity of trading in the world has a powerful influence on the planning preparation and execution of your trading plan. If you think of it as a quest for the holy Grail, it would not be surprising for you to use the language of mysticism, spirituality, intuition and to […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: 4 ways to measure volatility
Volatility is such an important part of any shorter term trader’s trading strategy that it is worth taking a few moments to consider several different ways that it can be measured and understood. Depending on the typical length of time you plan to hold your positions you may find one or the other of these […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Choose your self-talk wisely
The words we use matter. Words have power to shape our outcomes and direct our way through the future. Language is connected to our deepest emotional centers and affects us in profound ways. Steven Pinker makes the point that it is the artifact of language which distinguishes us from other species far more than the […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Finding your best mental state for trading
In previous articles I have described my concept of the “zero-state”, and the combination of personal satisfaction and improved bottomline performance I get when I trade from that state. In this article I want to describe some other mental states that traders I know find useful and consider the implications for your own journey of […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Experiencing the Zero-State
For me, achieving the zero-state is a necessary precondition for trading at my peak. In other essays I have described it as a place where adjective pairs of mental states cancel each other out, leaving only a moment of pure being. It is the space between the words that we know, a moment and a […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: Trading From the Zero-State
One of the most important qualities of the professional trader is the ability to manage your psychological state. Psychology is such an important component of shorter term trading that it can make all the difference between success and failure. In my own trading, the essential state of mind I must be in to trade at […]
Profitable ETF Trading Strategies: How science can improve your trading
Trading by its very nature is filled with uncertainty. Any human endeavor that has such a strong psychological component must be uncertain, until such time as human nature itself undergoes a fundamental change. It is uncertainty which helps make a market for assets. It’s what helps drive the discovery process to uncover the relative value […]