For those who trade, the desire to improve performance is an obsession. No one who trades is so stubborn, so conceited, or so successful that he is not constantly striving to improve upon his results. He may not admit it to others but it is so. He may pretend that he desires nothing other than to maintain the status quo. He is telling an ivory lie and he knows it. He wants to desperately make a little more this month than last and when he does he will want just as desperately to make more the coming month than the present one. Let him hit a home run and make a quick 80% on a trade and he will just as quickly want to make 100. Or let him make 20% this week and next he will want 30. Just last week I visited a successful trader and found him reading a new treatise on taming the stock market. He was enjoying it and learning, he said, “something that can help me with my game.” I was going to ask why but then it dawned on me: No matter how successful he is there is always room to improve. No ivory lies here, just an honest approach and a love of the game.
The stock trader believes in long engagements. He courts a suitor as elusive as she is enchanting. She leads him on with little rewards that fill him with hopes of victory. Then she scorns and humbles him, leaving him desperate for another chance. Sometimes he hides his losses with pent up anger and at other times throws a fit as he leaves his trading room destined never to return again. You know what happens next. He returns again and suddenly he can do no wrong. The beloved loves him again and he declares his devotion in turn. With each return he becomes even more arrogant and conceited. He has righted his ways. He is a market god. Zeus in his stock selection, swift as Hermes in his profit taking. He truly has the Midas touch and he knows it. Unfortunately, so does everyone else.
But, alas and alack, his suitor will take care of him…all too well. When the trader is at his most confident, displaying arrogance much like before, his suitor will put him in his place. He will double up on the sure thing, he will hope for more on a winner, he will add to a loser. He will be humiliated once again. Ah humility! That is the word for which our trader has no respect.
Trading is, at it’s very essence, humbling. It may be, for that reason alone, the greatest game ever designed. It is such an expertly designed game that no trader, either amateur or professional, full-time or part-time, can ever reach the point at which he can rightfully say, I have found the secret. Even the very best have succumbed to rejection. Even the most disciplined has been intoxicated with his suitor’s advances. Humility is the bedrock upon which respect is built, along with the constant study of a restless, emotional organism too complex to pass off as conquered. The trader, therefore, would be lost without his humbled study, just as Alicia would be lost without her Keys or Tiger without his Woods.
It is with humbled study that the trader becomes aware of his limitations, his weaknesses, and his strengths. It is with humbled study that the trader appreciates and respects his suitor. It is with humbled study that the trader accepts not only the rewards of a lifelong relationship but the hard lessons sown to reap those rewards.
