Major
General J.F.C. Fuller once wrote: “If we wish to think clearly, we must cease
imitating. If we wish to cease imitating, we must make use of our imagination. Audacity
and not caution must be our watch word.”
This can strongly be applied to trading and all forms of investing. How often do we
spend time and a lot of money trying to imitate something or someone’s strategy
for success? How often do we fail when
imitating someone else’s strategy? One of the main reasons is is because we do not really take the time to own it.
To be good
at something is to get into the head space of thinking clearly. In order to
think clearly we need to stop imitating and start using our imagination.
One of the
biggest ways to think clearly is the ability to break it down. If you are
modelling or imitating some, or someone’s strategy, break it down into language
you respond to. As a general rule I break it down to the ridiculous and
generally getting to that level, you will find out pretty quickly if you are
imitating or learning from someone that can add benefit to your investing or
trading. This in itself is how to stop imitating, as if someone is not aligning
to where I am going, what my plans are, what I have trying to achieve, and what
I am looking to learn, they then hold no value.
It is a great
strategy to model someone else’s success and carve it out to make it your own,
as modelling the right person and strategy will help you not to reinvent the wheel
and give you a running start. But with investing and trading you need to be
careful, as the internet and books are heavily sold in this field and yet most
of them will not actually improve your trading, nor will you learn anything of
real value. I have spent the last 20 years and lots of money, reading various
books, buying various courses, and completing various training, and yet I can
probably narrow it down to a very small hand full of books that are worthwhile.
The rest are general in nature and do not really provide any benefit to the investor
or trader.
This is
where we go back to the quote, over the years I have talked to many different
traders and investors and quickly realized how confused they are about whatever
it is they are trying to achieve. I once went to a trader’s seminar
association, and found out I was actually one of the small percentage of people
in the room who actually trade and invest. I thought that was incredibly strange,
but shows how people can be frozen in time because of information overload and
no way to clear their mind and take action. I find they are wound up so tight,
trying to follow a system or strategy down to the tee or trying to model
something, or just trying to get their head around what is written (never mind
what is written or taught could be absolutely wrong and they are trying to
understand something that is wrong and/or makes no sense anyway), no wonder why
people are confused. Then you have the overly paid sales men pushing something
that is so complicated that if you lose money from a trade they can find a way
and reason why that happened and what you did wrong. What a load of rubbish. But
you need to be bigger than this, and move out of the “googling” and start using
your imagination to come up with your next great investment strategy.
Once you
have a clear mind you need audacity to make it happen and bring it together.
With the daring and willingness, to challenge assumptions, and tackle the
difficult and hard to do. If you don’t have a clear mind and the ability to
think clearly, you will continue trying to imitate someone or some strategy
without making it your own.
There is no
silver bullet, and you will never find one, there are only thoughts and experiences.
As an investor we need to realize this and move away from it emotionally and use
our imagination on how we can make money from these thoughts and experiences.
So in
short; Breakaway from everything emotionally, continue to read and learn, but
remove yourself from any specific strategy and use your imagination to come up
with your own investing technique and style. Make your strategy mechanical,
practical, logical, well thought out and planned and then own it. Read, Learn,
identify the takeaways that can help assist you in where you want to go, then
implement those specific takeaways into your strategy. Once your mind is clear and
you have it all clearly defined, take action with no delay and implement your
new improved kick arse trading strategy.
