Resistance is Useless...or is it?

Bad Assed Trader:  A recent conversation with my older daughter gave me a different perspective to the power of the subconscious mind in subverting our hope, dreams and goals - trading and otherwise.

We were discussing jogging, of all things.  Now I should start by making it clear categorically that neither of us are serious runners.  We both exercise for our health and to try to keep our weight down but left to our own devices we would not actively seek out running opportunities.  We run slowly with occasional bursts of moderate speed.  So I'll stick to the word jog.

She jogs freestyle, by which I mean she'll don her kit and head off into the park and just go.  I jog in a controlled environment - the gym.  I had not realised just how different the two are until I tried to  freestyle and kept grinding to a halt.

In the gym the treadmill propels me along at varying speeds determined by my expert trainer/coach Chris.  My body just has to keep up but my mind has very little to do other than keep motivated to stay on the treadmill until the programme has done its job.

So I asked her, how do you keep going?  I find my body just slows me down until I'm walking. Then I'll realise I'm not running and make another start at running but very quickly the body seems to become a dead weight and draw me to a walk again.  I'm perplexed that the speed and duration of my run on a treadmill is so difficult to replicate when freestyling.

Her answer was fascinating and it applies completely to trading.  What I learnt from her is that it is all a matter of mind over body.  She made the following points:

• Our subconscious doesn't see the point in running - it is naturally set on a default of Conserve Your Energy - which means walking
• When we run we have to override that default setting consciously
• This means concentrating continuously on keeping the running going
• This means finding a strong reason to run which more than offsets the pain of the lungs from breathlessness and of the muscles from exertion
• The minute we stop consciously concentrating on that motivation the subconscious takes over and before we realise it we've slowed right down 
• After sustained efforts along these lines one has hopefully retrained one's subconscious to accept running as a new default setting which can be switched on at will - the length of time involved being different for each of us

This lesson in running reminded me immediately of the similar struggle in trading to override the impulses of the subconscious mind.  I have often experienced the same issues:

• The subconscious, when trading, is set on a default position of greed unless it has recently suffered losses which has then led to the default setting switching to fear - temporarily
• When we trade we have to override those default settings by consciously getting our mindset into one which is objective and open to receiving all the information provided by the charts - information both for and against taking a trade and being able to judge and weigh it all according to our rules
• This means continuously concentrating on being objective, focusing on the chart information rather than how much money we feel we want/need to make, how much we have just made/lost, how great or crap a trader we feel we are right now
• This means finding a strong reason to be objective, finding an override switch which allows you to turn on that objective mindset
• The minute we stop consciously concentrating on being objective the greedy subconscious takes over (it knows full well we're doing this for the money) and - particularly if we've had a good run - it starts relaxing the rules just like it relaxes our legs when we're out there trying to have a good jog in the park
• After sustained efforts along these lines  one has hopefully retrained one's subconscious to accept objective rule based trading as a new default setting which can be switched on at will - the length of time involved being different for each of us

This subconscious mind is clearly the engine room of our brain, keeping our body ticking away without us having to pay any attention to it which is great.  It's obviously the result of hundreds of thousands of years of programming to achieve certain default settings which worked at the time.

The interesting thing about trading is that to succeed at it we need to rework those inherited default settings - consciously.

The Vogon: A Representation of the Subconscious Mind?

But from a position of great strength (those hundreds of thousands of years of evolution) our subconscious minds are quietly chanting "Resistance is useless" just like the ugly green Vogon in the epic "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" who had Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent in a vicious headlock before chucking them into the spaceship's disposal unit ready to be ejected into outer space.

In the story they are rescued by another space ship which works on an infinite improbability drive.  Conscious trading is all about assessing the probabilities of the movement of price action and selecting the highest probability trades.  So the trick is to spot that Vogon mindset and make an active switch to consciously determined probabilities.

Who'd have thought that "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" could provide insight into the role of probabilities in rescuing us from our Vogon subconsciousnesses when trading?