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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Douglas
Creating consistency requires that you completely accept that trading isn’t about hoping, wondering, or gathering evidence one way or the other to determine if the next trade is going to work. The only evidence you need to gather is whether the variables you use to define an edge are present at any given moment.
When you use “other” information, outside the parameters of your edge to decide whether you will take the trade, you are adding random va...
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5. Every moment in the market is unique.
What separates the best traders from all the rest is that they have trained their minds to believe in the uniqueness of each moment
This belief acts as a counteracting force, neutralizing the automatic association mechanism.
When you truly believe that each moment is unique, then by definition there isn’t anything in your mind for the association mechanism to link that moment to.
When you completely accept the psychological realities of the market, you will correspondingly accept the risks of trading.
When you accept the risks of trading, you eliminate the potential to define market information in painful ways.
When you stop defining and interpreting market information in painful ways, there is nothing for your mind to av...
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When there’s nothing to protect against, you will have access to all that you know about the...
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Nothing will get blocked, which means you will perceive all the possibilities you have learned about (objectively), and since your mind is open to a true exchange of energy, you will quite naturally start discovering othe...
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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.
How Beliefs Shape Our Lives
1. They manage our perception and interpretation of environmental information in a way that is consistent with what we believe.
2. They create our expectations. Keep in mind that an expectation is a belief projected into some future moment. Since we can’t expect something we don’t know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.
3. Anything we decide to do or any outward expression of behavior will be consist...
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4. Finally, our beliefs shape how we feel about the resul...
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our beliefs will always represent a limited version of what is possible from the environment’s perspective, making our beliefs a statement about reality, but not necessarily a definitive statement of reality.
1. Beliefs resist any force that would alter their present form.
once a belief has been formed, it cannot be destroyed.
The easiest and most effective way to work with our beliefs is to gently render them inactive or nonfunctional by drawing the energy out of them.
this process de-activation.
Without energy, it doesn’t have the potential to act as a force on our perception of information or on our behavior.
The secret to effectively changing our beliefs is in understanding and, consequently, believing that we really aren’t changing our beliefs; we are simply transferring energy from one concept to another concept, one that we find more useful in helping us to fulfill our desires or achieve our goals.
2. All active beliefs demand expression.
I say that beliefs “demand” to be expressed because once something causes us to tap into our beliefs, it seems as if we can’t stop the flood of energy that’s released.
When we purposely choose to question a belief (question what we know), and sincerely desire an answer, we make our minds available to receive a “brilliant idea,” “inspiration,” or “solution” to the issue at hand.
beliefs control our perception of information.
beliefs exist in our mental environment from the moment they are born to the moment we die, unless we consciously take steps to de-activate them.
it takes more energy to act or express ourselves than the amount of energy it takes to observe something.
the underlying cause of fear is the potential to define and interpret market information as threatening.
What is the source of our potential to interpret market information as threatening? Our expectations!
When the market generates information that doesn’t conform to what we expect, the up and down tics seem to take on a threatening ...
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Consequently, we experience fear, stress, and anxiety. What is the underlying source of our ...
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if you are still experiencing negative states of mind when you trade, you can assume there’s a conflict between what you “know” about probable outcomes and any number of other beliefs in your mental environment that are arguing (demanding expression) for something else.
To think in probabilities, you have to believe that every moment in the market is unique, or more specifically, that every edge has a unique outcome.
When you believe that you don’t know what is going to happen next, what exactly are you expecting from the market?
said “I don’t know,”
If you believe that something will happen and that you don’t need to know exactly what that something is to make money, then where’s the potential to define and interpret...
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“There is...
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Until we actively train our minds to expect a unique outcome, we will continue experiencing only what we know; everything else (other information and possibilities that are not consistent with what we know and expect) will pass us by, unperceived, discounted, distorted, outright denied, or attacked.
When you truly believe that you don’t need to know, you will be thinking in probabilities (the market perspective) and will have no reason to block, discount, distort, deny, or attack anything the market is offering about its potential to move in any particular direction.
3. Beliefs keep on working regardless of whether we are consciously aware of their existence in our mental environment.
SELF-VALUATION AND TRADING
there could be a huge gap between how much money we desire for ourselves, how much we perceive is available, and how much we actually believe we are worth or deserve.
it’s almost impossible to grow up in any social environment and not acquire some negatively charged beliefs that would argue against success or accumulating vast sums of money.
Most of these self-sabotaging beliefs have long been forgotten and operate at a subconscious level, but the fact that we may have forgotten them doesn’t mean they’ve been de-activated.
The way these subconscious self-sabotaging beliefs manifest themselves in our trading is usually in the form of lapses in focus or concentration, resulting in any number of trading errors, like putting in a buy for a sell or vice versa, or allowing yourself to give in to distracting thoughts that compel you to leave the screen, only to find out when you return that you missed the big trade of the day.
As magically as money can flow into a trader’s accounts when he is “in the zone,” it can just as easily flow out, if he is in a negative zone where unresolved self-valuation issues mysteriously act on his perception of information and behavior.
I am not implying here that you have to de-activate every belief that would argue against your ever-expanding positive sense of self-valuation, because you don’t.
