Mindfulness, practice and the relevance to trading – Part A
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Mindfulness, practice and the relevance to trading – Part A
Day trading in the stock market, money, numbers, graphs, ups, downs…
What does this have to do with mindfulness and how does it have anything to do with me?
The truth is all my life I stayed away and even despised the spiritual world… summonings, reality-creating thought and all that mumbo jumbo
I lived my life furthest away from it all.
Meditations, Buddhism…
What is this nonsense?
And a bit like the Buddha himself, I didn't encounter illness and death, I didn't go through major crises, I chose to ignore anything that could be perceived in my eyes as suffering.
(Whether it's good or bad doesn't really matter, it’s in the past…)
Nearing forty, I experienced what I allowed myself to interpret as a crisis and suffering for the first time in my life. My systems could not handle it.
My pancreas attacked itself and collapsed. Since then I have been diabetic (TYPE 1).
Yes, there is such a thing as juvenile onset diabetes that comes at a late age, it's called LADA, I was surprised as well.
More or less at this stage I realized that something had to change and that something was me. So very briefly, that's how my romance with Buddhism began.
I stopped being so cynical and looked for a lifeline. I started reading and delving into anything that could help balance my sugar levels. I started with breathing.
It turns out that breathing is simple, a routine thing. But the more I learned, I realized that I simply don't do it enough.
That although there is plenty of air around me, I don’t appreciate it enough nor take advantage of this fact (this is what a wise Zen instructor taught me). And much like any human being who finds himself in distress, I made a decision to jump into the deep waters and surrender.
I took a basic course at the PsychoDharma Center with Ada Avshalom and I fell in love. What she said, the way she said it, the way she made Buddhism accessible. Everything made sense to me and sounded logical. I felt that my body was responding as well as my sugar levels.
From then on until today, I haven’t stopped learning. Whether its additional courses and workshops through the Psychodharma Center at Cypress Campus, through workshops at the Become One Center where two of my good friends train and coach. Joining meditation groups, reading everything I can about Buddhism and mindfulness as well as watching all of Professor Yaakov Raz’s lectures that I can find on YouTube. I like his approach; his voice and intonation calm me and everything he tells and explains is smart and makes so much sense to me. Above all, I try to persevere, to practice meditation and awareness of the here and now.
Admittedly, I don't practice every day.
But I acquired myself a tool.
A tool that I can use whenever I need and from that moment, the choice is truly mine.
So from all this introduction I hope you were able to understand that I am not spiritual in the fanatical sense. I don’t think sitting in front of the sea at sunset is the only place to meditate, neither is it only in retreats and workshops that make me a better, more complete and more developed person.
I believe that I am good, whole and developed just the way I am and I don't need expensive, mind and life altering weekends.
What I do need is to continue learning, to breathe and really know myself, to spend more time with myself and in our context, to be in a meditative state while I trade.
What does it mean?
According to the dictionary:
Contemplation, insight, deep introspection, investigation of one’s own soul, mental practice, a technical tool originating in the Hindu religion for performing self-action in the human soul.
In practice this means: to be ready to meet what is, exactly as it is.
In meditation you cannot fail or succeed.
Everything that arises is simply an object of observation and everything is within the following scope: IT IS WHAT IT IS.
(Of course, this is entirely my personal opinion, like everything else written in this blog, it is my personal observation, understanding and interpretation.)
Another thing important to note is that the Buddhist path does not invite passivity or inaction, a lack of thinking about the future or a lack of planning, as I suspected at the beginning of my journey. It only invites us to pay attention to how it is done and to constantly check whether our doing and planning puts us in a place of suffering and discomfort.
Now let's understand how all this connects to trading and why only when I trade in a meditative state, I’m able to profit consistently!!
Even a monkey can press the buy/sell button and happen to make a profit and this can happen several times in a row. Everyone talks about this monkey as a story that happened or didn't really happen but regardless, it cannot be consistent over time and my goal is to create consistent and regular income from day trading with Nasdaq stocks.
And this is the comparison in several tangential points, according to my view.
It all starts from:
1. The Buddha's Advice To The Kalamas::
He told them about his path, his way of life and his beliefs. Then, when they told him that someone else visited them yesterday, also a wise man who told them other things, they asked him why they should follow and believe him.
He answered:
Do not believe the teachers or what is written in the holy scriptures. Check for yourself. But in order to know, you have to experiment and devote yourself to the new learning, suspend and pause the patterns, views and objections that arise and truly dive into studying.
Similarly with trading: Don’t believe me or any other teacher or mentor. Check for yourself, experiment, devote yourself to it, suspend and pause the repeating patterns, views and objections, which often arise and immerse yourself into learning.
Also regarding strategies: don’t just believe, check for yourself!
There is no alternative. Acquiring a new skill requires going through difficulty, there is a ‘tuition fee’ to pay and it’s best to know in advance what it is and whether you wish to bear it.
2. The three characteristics of reality according to Buddhism:
- Unease - Dukkha - gap between the common and the desirable
- Constant change – everything changes is transient and temporary
- Dependent origination - everything is connected and we are an inseparable part of a whole world, we are not separate.
There is a direct connection between all three because change enables dependent arising.
Dependent arising enables and causes change and there is a connection between change and unease.
The Buddha says that you cannot go through life without encountering unease and it's better to come to terms with it. The most terrible unease is created when we try to avoid it.
The same is true in trading:
- Discomfort. There is a gap between the result I want and the result I actually get. A large part of the time, especially in the beginning, you will feel discomfort. The attempts to avoid this discomfort (losses) will only cause bigger losses. For example, not exiting a losing trade and thus increasing the loss or hesitating before entering a trade due to the fear of loss and entering too late.
- Constant change. The market is in constant change and it is probably impossible to trust that a trend or price movement will continue and that a stock will behave the same as it did before. Us traders are also in constant change, I will not be the same when I trade the next trade because it will probably be affected by the result of the current or previous trade or from what I went through this morning. Or how much confidence I have at a given moment or how incompetent I am to trade in another.
No two transactions are the same so you cannot expect the same result. Even if the price is the same price and the volume is the same and the previous movement is the same and the trend seems the same - There will always be differences because it is never the same traders. There is a difference between a trader on the other side who ate lunch or another who’s hungry or a trader who made money all morning or lost yesterday. The smallest difference between the traders is enough for a trade to be different.
After we realize that everything changes, that everything is temporary and passes, we will understand that our attempt to hold on is like trying to catch and hold water flowing from the tap - an illusion. Then we can let go.
- Dependent origination: There is no need to really expand, after all within the trading system we are barely a screw, a crumb. We are part of a whole system in which one thing affects another, we are not separate, not special and do not influence or decide about anything but ourselves and even this is not true because an unskilled day trader does not even influence himself but is influenced by market volatility, sabotaging beliefs, thoughts and destructive patterns. The goal here is to reach a state where indeed we do not control the market but we will manage to control ourselves!
For me, the beautiful and yet dangerous thing about the profession I chose as a day trader is that there are no rules. This is the first time in my life that I am acting solely according to the rules I set for myself - I do not depend on anyone, not on customers, not on suppliers, not on advertising, I depend only on myself.
But that's not entirely the truth...
The truth is that rules were established for a reason and when a person acts in total chaos and without rules (are you familiar with “Lord of the Flies”, by Nobel Prize winning British author William Golding?), it is inevitable that she or he will harm themselves. Hence, the importance ofwriting the rules myself and to stand by them even though it is difficult because no one but me will ever know if I stood by them or not. Learn from others and remember that on the other side of every trade is another person / organization / bot and I don’t really operate in a world without any rules and regulations.
English 
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