THE DYNAMICS OF PERCEPTION

• Objectives of this book are to teach you how to take the threat of pain out of market information.
• Way to redefine your relationship to market information so that there will be little or no potential to perceive any of it as threatening.
• The process of trading starts with perceiving an opportunity. Without the perception of an opportunity, we wouldn’t have a reason to trade.
• If memories, distinctions, and beliefs don’t exist as physical matter, then there really isn’t any alternative way for them to exist except as some form of energy. If this is, in fact, the case, can this energy take on a specific shape? Can it be structured in a way that reflects the external forces that caused it to come into existence? Most definitely!
• Anything that is energy has the potential to act as a force expressing its form, and that is exactly what our memories, distinctions, and beliefs do. They act as a force on our senses from the inside, expressing their form and content, and, in the process of doing so, they have a profoundly limiting effect on the information we perceive in any given moment, making much of the information that is available from the environment’s perspective, and the possibilities inherent within that information, literally invisible.
• Initially, the chart represented undifferentiated information. Undifferentiated information usually creates a state of confusion, and that’s probably what you experienced when you first encountered a chart.
• Most of us have no concept of the extent to which we are continually surrounded by the invisible opportunities inherent in the information we’re exposed to.
• To learn about something, we have to be able to experience it in some way. So what we have here is a closed loop that prevents us from learning. Perceptual closed loops exist in all of us because they are natural functions of the way mental energy expresses itself on our senses.
• Put it a little differently: People see what they’ve learned to see, and everything else is invisible until they learn how to counteract the energy that blocks their awareness of whatever is unlearned and waiting to be discovered.
• Each of us has at one time or another witnessed a situation in which someone was experiencing fear, when from our perspective there wasn’t the least bit of danger or threat.
• Fear is irrational because this “now moment” opportunity has absolutely nothing to do with your last trade. Each trade is simply an edge with a probable outcome, and statistically independent of every other trade.
• One person’s perception of risk can easily be perceived as irrational thinking by another. Risk is relative, but to the person who perceives it in the moment, it seems absolute and beyond question.
• Won’t be able to perceive what he hasn’t yet learned about unless he is in a state of mind that is conducive to learning.
• Projecting the pain he is experiencing in the moment onto the dog. That painful energy then gets reflected back to him, so that he perceives a dog that is threatening, painful, and dangerous. This process makes the second dog identical in character, properties, and traits to the one that is in the boy’s memory bank.
• Can’t perceive possibilities that he hasn’t learned about yet. And it is extremely difficult to learn anything new if you’re afraid because, as you already well know, fear is a very debilitating form of energy.
• Is it also possible for traders to self-generate their own experiences of fear and emotional pain as they interact with market information and be thoroughly convinced that their pain and fear were completely justified by the circumstances?
• One of your basic objectives as a trader is to perceive the opportunities available, not the threat of pain.
• If what you perceive at any given moment causes you to feel fear, ask yourself this question: Is the information inherently threatening, or are you simply experiencing the effect of your own state of mind reflected back to you (as in the above illustration)?
• Were you perceiving what the market was making available, or perceiving what was in your mind reflected back to you?
• If you can accept the fact that the market doesn’t generate positively or negatively charged information as an inherent characteristic of the way it expresses itself, then the only other way information can take on a positive or negative charge is in your mind, and that is a function of the way the information is processed.
• What causes the information to take on a positive or negative quality is the same unconscious mental process that caused the boy to perceive the second dog as threatening and dangerous when all the dog was offering was playfulness.
• Our minds constantly associate what’s outside of us (information) with something that’s already in our mind (what we know), making it seem as if the outside circumstances and the memory, distinction, or belief these circumstances are associated with are exactly the same.
• Developing and maintaining a state of mind that perceives the opportunity flow of the market, without the threat of pain or the problems caused by overconfidence, will require that you take conscious control of the association process.