The Now

The Now

By Lucas Tarigal

The Now: it is so simple, yet so elusive to almost all of us most of the time.  I named my blog “Trading in the Now” for a reason, because the Now moment is the gateway into success in any endeavor in life.  What does it mean to be good at waiting?  What does it mean to be in the Now?  When I first started trading, I knew that if I could just be completely present in this moment, I would succeed in trading.  It took me years and years to pass the point of conceptuality, and get to the point where I recognized this truth in actuality.  This article is going to detail why the ability to wait is so important to a trader, and some ways that you can start putting this into your life.

Trading has one of the highest “kill” rates of any career.  The number of people who were smart, dedicated, disciplined, and ambitious who have still failed at trading is tremendous.  Trading is not rocket science, yet so many people fail at it while at the same time succeeding in things that could be higher pressure or more complex.  One reason for this phenomenon is the difference between doing and being.  This is a concept that I will come back to many, many times.  In America especially, we are trained that we need to go out and do!  We need to work, we need to have projects going on, we need to have something that we push ourselves in, or something that we worry about.  When we go to work, we are expected to be busy for the whole day, or at least look busy.  If we look stressed out, even better!  It just means we are working hard: time for a promotion!  This training to be a “doer” causes us to fail miserably in the market (among other things).

The usual path of a trader goes something like this:

•Start off with high hopes, high interest, and high energy
•Have some success/have some losses
•Intensify study/time spent on the market/dedication (doing)
•Results become worse and worse, pain escalates, frustration/sadness/fear arises
•Spiral down into an emotional vortex of pain and anger
•Quit/Begin to have Aha moments
•Become a Consistently Successful Trader.

The sequence that traders go through is not cut and dry, and the above is just a rough estimation, but it shares some common experiences among everyone.  If you look deeper into this sequence, you will also recognize other endeavors, or even whole lifetimes: people start off with high hopes and become more and more miserable as they get older.  The reason this occurs is because of the focus on doing so exclusively that we think that if only we can do MORE, we can become fulfilled/happy/a winner.  This leads to trading around the clock, trading from pocket PCs, or watching one-minute charts all day for no reason at all.  This feeling arises that says “if only we could be a little bit faster, if we had just a little bit better or more information, or if something had happened just a bit differently, we could be successful.” This feeling is no doubt behind the motivation to use inside information illegally: you finally have a sure winner.

I know this feeling well because I lived with it for years (a significant percentage of such a short life as mine!).  I went through a constant cycle that would repeat over and over again.  I would start off doing well; I would make some good trades, make some money, and think Aha! I found it!  I would intensify my energy and dedication, throwing myself into trading.  Slowly things would start to turn around, some losses would come, and I would start to feel frantic.  I would try and try and try, worry over my positions, and do everything in my power to WIN!  But every time, I would lose more then I made in the first place, and would end up doing something extreme in a last ditch effort to save some equity (up the leverage baby!).  This last ditch effort of course would fail, which would cause a huge emotional uprising, followed by a collapse, and then clarity.  At this point, I would start the whole cycle again, sometimes with a new methodology, or tweaking with an older one.

This cycle occurs in different forms among traders and regular people alike.  Mine was particularly intense and would repeat itself every two weeks or so.  In some ways I was lucky because it would only cost me a couple hundred dollars, not whole accounts.  This cycle is very painful, but the silver lining is that eventually it trains you how to be a winner.  The pain that is causes becomes so intense that eventually you either quit, or you have to change; those become the only two choices.  In other words, you fight until there is simply no fight left in you, and you succumb to the wisdom that you have known all along.  I know in my own journey, there was always this little part of me that said: “yeah, I know you cannot beat the market…but I am special…maybe if I just try this…”  I literally had to run out of things to try before it finally stuck in my head that I had to be disciplined and consistent if I wanted results that mirrored this: there were no shortcuts.

So what does this have to do with being, doing, or waiting?  When you are stuck in a cycle of losses or generally unhappy with your results, you are end focused.  This means that there is some destination that you are trying to get to.  For me, it was being “successful.”  I thought that somehow, if I could just find the right thing, I would attain the success that I was going after.  If you are experiencing this, you will soon find that this rabbit hole has no bottom.  At first, success is a 10% increase in equity, a new house, or a nicer car.  It feels good for a while, but soon enough, something is wrong.  You aren’t quite sure, but this “success” really isn’t fulfilling you like you thought it was, it wasn’t the right thing.  So something in your mind says: “Ahh but success is not only 10%, its 20%!  That’s what the real pros get.”  This thought spurs you to push harder, to do more and more.  This is why you see rich people who are absolutely miserable with all the things they have.  You would think that more money would mean less stress right?  WRONG!  For these people, every year they become richer and richer, have more and more things, are able to do more and more, yet they feel like they are slipping farther and farther behind.  When am I going to make it?!  When will I arrive?! Is there some other way?

There is another way.  The key to success is not in doing more.  In fact, doing or attaining more will never give you a sense of accomplishment or success; it will always be fleeting and short lived.  The key to success is bringing the essence of being into your trading.  I am going to give you some exercises that will facilitate this, but first I will explain it so that you can understand the foundation of what I am getting across.  There are two sides to everything you will do as a trader (and in life).  There is the side that actually does something, and then there is the side that is aware of doing something.  There needs to be a balance so that with every action, there is awareness behind that action.  You want to be completely focused on your task that you set yourself, not on autopilot.  The purpose of this is to take you away from being end focused, and to become path focused.  When you are focused on some end (success, the new car, etc), you will make yourself miserable, and will listen to your more destructive emotions.  If you want to be a pro, then consistent trading is the only way to go.  That is WHY they are professionals and people give them money, because they can MAKE money consistently.  As soon as you focus on an end, you limit yourself to some short sighted pleasure that has nothing to do with success in trading.  Success in trading is built up over years and years, even decades, and your small mind that gets a little high when you account is up a few dollars today cannot see this far ahead.

Path focus means that you are both focused on the long term, as well as the short term.  You are focused on the long term in that you act in a way that will build a foundation of success over the long run.  This means that you do your due diligence in whatever trading method you trade, do not take shortcuts that you know can hurt you, and keep long term success in mind.  You are short term focused in that you give yourself completely to whatever you are doing at this moment.  As long as you give your 100% to whatever you are doing at this moment, your long term results will take care of themselves (Woot! Less to worry about!).  Giving your 100% means that you “do your best,” which means constantly asking yourself whether your work reflects your best efforts, or whether you can do better.  Doing your best in trading, and life in general, is the key to long term fulfillment: you never have any regrets when you do your absolute best in everything you do.  The Olympic sprinter who gives 95% of himself and comes in second will be kicking himself for the rest of his life.  The Olympic sprinter who gives his 100%, but comes in 5th may be momentarily disappointed, but will never look back with regrets or thoughts about what could have been.  So give your 100%!

The exercise that I had in mind is very loose, and open to your own creative involvement, so long as you stick to the spirit of the exercise.  In this exercise, you are going to do something very simple: write down what you are doing.  This exercise is just a tool, a simple stepping stone that you can pull out when you need it, or put away when you are done with it.  Therefore, there is no need to commit to some strenuous, year long, regiment that you wont stick to anyways (although if that’s your thing, then go for it).  You are going to keep a notepad by your desk and write down exactly what you are doing while you are trading and doing trading research (or whatever your endeavor is).  This does not mean you write down “scratched my leg…took a deep breath…belched the alphabet.”  You want to write down what you are “doing,” and then write down how long you spent on each of these things.  This will get you to focus on what exactly you are doing, and that focus will bring the being into that doing.  You are shifting your attention from emotional clock time, which speeds up and slows down, to actual clock time, which is constant.  Here is an example:

•Checked Email, read newsletters for 15 minutes
•Went through the main 40 stocks I followed for 15 minutes
•Read the five blogs I like to follow and their new articles for 35 minutes.
•Watched the market for 25 minutes.

The things that you write in this are up to you.  If you question whether you should put it down, then put it down.  This exercise will really open your eyes to how you fill up your day, and what your attention span is like.  While it may seem that you can get more done if you multitask and jump from thing to thing, this exercise actually makes you more efficient by focusing on just one thing at a time, and giving your full attention to that one thing.  You will check your email less often knowing that you have to write it down.  You will truly give your whole focus to research if you know that it is the only thing you will be doing for the next 30 minutes.  I used to jump back and forth between watching the market, reading emails, checking blogs, writing twitters, chatting with friends, etc.  When you finally focus on just doing one thing, you will find that you get a lot more done, and it is of higher quality through bringing being into it.

This exercise is yours, so do with it as you will.  You will enjoy your trading and life in general more the less you have to write down (meaning the longer you focus on doing one thing).  You can do the exercise for however long you want, or not at all even.  I would suggest trying it for at least a day, give yourself that.  If you get through the day, try one more, you can always put it aside for awhile, there is no pressure here.  Remember, your trading is yours alone, no one is going to push you to become better, you get to set your own pace and rhythm (isn’t that why we do this in the first place?).  As you do the exercise, and some of the others I will be posting on this site, you will find that how you trade does not change significantly.  You will still go through the same process (finding trades, putting in stops, etc), but the quality of what you do will change drastically.  Your trades will begin to have a high quality to them, your time will not be spent frivolously, and you will find more energy and joy coming into your trading.  You will definitely worry less, you will know the exact reason why you do any action (arguably the key to success in trading), and you will be pleasantly surprised by how simple everything was in the first place.

This exercise may not give you all that tomorrow, but it will be a tool that you can use, along with others, that over time will move you in this direction.  I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.  Happy trading.

Love,

Lucas