WORKING WITH YOUR BELIEFS

• The market is a series of up and down tics that form patterns.
• Technical analysis defines these patterns as edges.
• When you are at peace with not knowing what’s going to happen next, you can interact with the market from a perspective where you will be making yourself available to let the market tell you, from its perspective, what is likely to happen next.
• Any particular pattern defined as an edge is simply an indication that there is a higher probability that the market will move in one direction over the other.
• A pattern implies consistency, or, at least, a consistent outcome.
• Each pattern is a unique occurrence.
• Our minds have an inherent design characteristic (the association mechanism) that can make the paradox of a pattern implying consistency but each pattern being a unique occurrence difficult to deal with.
• Expectations are beliefs projected into some future moment.
• Every Moment from the market’s perspective is unique; but if the information being generated by the market is similar in quality, properties, or characteristic to something that is already in our minds, the two sets of information (outside and inside) automatically become linked.
• It’s our state of mind that makes the truth of whatever we’re perceiving outside of us (in the market) seem indisputable and beyond question.
• The instant we think we “know” what to expect, we simultaneously stop taking all the unknown forces and the various possibilities.
• Consistency is the result of a carefree, objective state of mind, where we are making ourselves available to perceive and act upon whatever the market is offering us (from its perspective) in any given “now moment.”
• Carefree means confident, but not euphoric.
• Objectivity is a state of mind where you have conscious access to everything you have learned about the nature of market movement.
• In other words, nothing is being blocked or altered by your pain-avoidance mechanisms.
• Making yourself available means trading from the perspective that you have nothing to prove.
• You aren’t trying to win or to avoid losing.
• Trading in the “now moment” means that there is no potential to associate an opportunity to get into, get out of, add to, or detract from a trade with a past experience that already exists in your mental environment.
• This belief acts as an internal force causing you to disassociate the “now” moment in the market from any previous moment filed away in your mental environment.
• Based on the way our minds are designed to process information, we will experience the “now moment” in the environment as being exactly the same as some previous moment as it exists inside our minds.
• The best traders in the world have trained their minds to believe in the uniqueness of each moment.
• If you believe that an edge is simply a higher probability of one thing happening over another, and there’s a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge, why would you gather “other” evidence for or against a trade?
• Expectations will be in harmony with the possibilities when you believe that all you need to know is the odds are in your favor before you put on a trade, how much it’s going to cost to find out if the trade is going to work, you don’t need to know what’s going to happen next to make money on that trade, and anything can happen.
• The stronger your belief in the uniqueness of each moment, the lower your potential to associate.
• The lower your potential to associate, the more open your mind will be to perceive what the market is offering you from its perspective.
• When you try to know, you are, in essence, trying to be right.
• Trading is a probability game where concepts like right and wrong or win and lose no longer have the same significance.
• Regardless of how much evidence you gather to support acting or not acting on a trade, it still only takes one trader somewhere in the world to negate the validity of any, if not all, of your evidence.
• To be open to a true exchange of energy, you can’t be in a state of knowing or believing that you already know what’s going to happen next.
• I am not implying here that you can’t predict what the market will do next and be right, because you most certainly can.
• If every loss puts you that much closer to a win, you will be looking forward to the next occurrence of your edge, ready and waiting to jump in without the slightest reservation or hesitation.