365QOD- Day1231

Having a  Crystal Ball

“I see a great future ahead of you”- a fortune teller’s words

I read an article from a day trader about the lessons he has learned from that trading.  I used to day trade so this was of interest to me.  And hopefully it will be of interest to you.  In next 11 posts I will explore the ideas from his post.

In the post, James Altucher gives us the first lesson he learned to be:

Lesson#1 You can’t predict the future. 

I believe that we often spend too much time worrying about what will happen in the future.  As I have written before, our powers to predict the future are very small.  We like to think that we can in order to remove most of the uncertainty of what will happen.

As James points out, marriages end in divorce. Healthy people suffer medical setbacks.  Non-smokers die from lung cancer.

All this predicting sets us up on the path to unhappiness.  By believing that we can predict in the first place and control in the second, we are racing towards unhappiness.

The solution?  The solution is to accept and enjoy the adventure of life as unpredictable and one that will end the way it is supposed to not the way we want it.

As an application to trading, I would say that one often finds themselves believing that an investment will go up in value.  Our belief is so strong that we are predicting that it will. The market sometimes does the opposite.  The market is what it is.  It is not our prediction that counts but a sum of everyone’s actions that lead to an investment going up or down.

Today’s question is:

“Are you enjoying or predicting your life?”