How we decide

I am currently reading this book called how we decide by jonah lehrer. Fascinating book! He really dives into the biological functioning of our brains and the chemical processes that take place when we are making decisions. It has already made me think much differently about the decisions i make each and every day (especially in trading) and has also revealed to me the big fallacy of emotions being a negative and detrimental part of life that must be supressed at all costs. Anyway i will share much more on this fascinating book as i have more time to write and I am further along but just wanted to say that if you wanted a fascinating read, pick up How We Decide, you won't be dissapointed.

Trend Lines and Time Frames

I have thought a lot recently about the similarities between trading and life but two elements continue to run through my mind; pivot points and multiple time frames. In trading we like to view things from multiple time frames in order to see the different trends that the derivative is making. For example a five minute chart may show the stock is moving in an upwards direction but the 30 minute chart may show that in fact the stock is moving down. Examining my life utilizing the time frame method is an interesting exercise that can help us find the path we are searching for. On any given day our life may swing around crazily as we are extremely governed by many predetermined forces exerting their pressures on us. When examined on a longer time frame, those pressures that on a 5 minute slice of our life threaten to overwhelm us are shown to be easily eliminated. Taking many different snapshots our life allows us to move beyond our daily struggles and map out a much more thoughtful and meaningful existence. This process helps identify the direction our life is taking. What you do with that information is completely up to the individual but every good trader constantly reassesses their performance or direction in order to respond to a rapidly changing world and maximize their performance in it.

Pivot points are those places the market tends to reverse direction and they exist on many different time frames and for a host of reasons. On your way to work you are feeling good; sipping your coffee, reading the newspaper when an email comes from your boss detailing the new and unexpected projects that must be done today. If you start to get upset and your emotions begin to alter your thought process, you have hit a pivot point. This sudden reversal of your daily life is a downward pivot on a short term. This happens despite and regardless of what your longer term trend lines may look like. However the long term perspective has pivot points as well and they may very well start with some simple seemingly random event that over time gains momentum and changes the long term trend line. In retrospect it is easy to identify these points; when we chose our college and when we meant our husband/wife being just a couple examples. But if you are cognizant enough of your life's trend lines and their subsequent effect on your very own shaping and molding then you could identify even the tiny pivot points in the minutiae of life and take steps to focus on consistently driving your life toward your goals. You never know what might be a turning point in your life and therefore should stay constantly alert or else what started as a simple disagreement or bad decision may multiply, eventually counteracting the long term trend line and establish itself as the dominant trend and without constant maintenance this new direction your life has taken may be one you never intended. Of course if you find yourself there just focus on the pivot points that will bring you back to the direction you want. I could write for days on these two topics of pivot points and time frames in life but I will let anybody that reads this dwell on it and perhaps some thoughts…

PS Sorry about the email blasts that probably went out, I am experimenting with texting to my blog posts and clearly it did not work…

Anticipation

Words and excitement have flowed from me like light from the sun. From one perspective these rays may look focused and concentrated but in reality they are as scattered as snowflakes. Each idea flutters down from the sky and finds it's rating place.  The moment is vast approaching and the closer it gets the more surreal the moment feels.  

My ah ha moment is almost upon me.

This morning I took time to take stock of the last year of my life.  

Here are some highlights. Graduated from college. Moved halfway across the country. Left every friend I had. Proposed. Got engaged (these two happened within seconds) Got a new job. My first job... Moved to a new city. Learned to live with a roomate, well kind of the jury is still out on whether I have shown any development on that front. Exhibit A being the piles of clothes that are currently in random places all over the apartment.

Now when you list it out like that it appears to be quite a year.   

However in the past couple of months I have never really thought it that much more life filled than amy other. I dwell on this and discover that much of this is due to my underlying confidence. Most people who spend time with me quickly realize that my substantially healthy confidence is one of my most commanding traits. For better or worse my confidence usually thrusts me down paths in life with a certain ferocity and strength of purpose that I understand can be difficult to match or understand.

This strength of purpose is what has taken control this year. In the absence of certainty about the future I have allowed this side of me to take the lead. This is why I have never doubted my wedding tomorrow why I for the most part have not thought top much about it. Because my strength of purpose and my belief in my destiny and fate concludes that nothing other than tomorrow will occur. Time will do as it always has and march ever onward. It is our duty to pay not as much attention to the ticking of the hands but  to the turning of the gears in our own lives.

This will most likely be my last post before the wedding. For those of you coming thank you and I will be happy to see you there. If you read this after the fact I hope you had a spectacular time. For tomorrow I marry Kierin and our destinies and our fates will from that day forward march forward into the fog of time together; hands clasped with smiles on our faces for we are assured of the others' presence on this perilous journey that We have walked for thousands of years. I pray that if Kierin and I come upon you in our path that it be a blessing and a gift to you. Thank you and with much love, Trevor

Something about focus, can't remember doing somethign else now...

The currents of life

Christ has been and forever will be my greatest teacher but today I am thinking about some lessons from the Buddhist tradition. I think no religion does a better job of acknowledging the large impact emotions have on our life. The buddhists teach a doctrine rooted in mindfulness. A practice that instructs it's followers to continually take stock of your emotions and the impact they are having on your cognitive abiliites.  The results of this practice are readily apparent by taking just a cursory glance at some of the words ascribed  

to Buddhism: peaceful, tranquil, centered, focused, and disciplined.   

How many of us strive for those same things every day and yet fall short?

In my life I spend my when day monitoring my emotions and gauging how they are impacting my decision making practice because the emotion I started a trade with may not be the same as the one I am using to exit that trade. Therefore, I am quite literally two different minds and continuing to trade as two different people would not be consistent and would have a negative impact on my performance.  Taking your emotional temperature throughout the day will help you achieve that centered lifestyle that you may be craving. It will not solve your problems but it may just center your thoughts enough that there is only one of you responding to the world's stimuli.

Physics Terms

Conduits or catalysts

A disclaimer to this post, i have not taken physics since high school and would not consider myself even somewhat familiar with the terms i am using in this post so i apologize if there metaphorical composition is flawed. 

Every day I sit in front of 5 screens and all day scroll through and analyze perhaps millions of pieces of data. My fine times brain picks out the two words on a website I am looking at, I find one number on a chart of hundreds that dictates my next decision, and occasionally stop at something that leaves me speechless. There was three things today one a jetpack that runs over water (god please let me live long enough to own one),two a twenty point down move in my spread that took out my gains for the day (I don't involve god in trading) and lastly a picture of a twelve year old boy holding his son. Yeah that's right son. By the way all of these things are real.

But as I ride the train towards a car ride to Minnesota I wonder am I a conduit or a catalyst. You see a conduit is simply something one passes through to get to where they are going, but a catalyst, that is something that quite literally adds something to the one moving through it's orbit. A catalyst puts itself into the mix and all of a sudden something powerful happens. The catalyst propels the person forward to untold new heights and at a pace that is both shocking and refreshing.

You know it right away when you are in the presence of a catalyst their vibrancy for life flows from them like a super soaker in august.  

Excuse the childhood reminesce there but those who have had the super soaker in august experience are blessed and know what I mean.

Hallejuah

This morning a woman got onto the train car. This is generally unspectacular but then she did something that on the 6:00 am train is rather unusual she greeted everybody on the train. "good morning my brothers and sisters hallelujah". She then proceeded to inform is that god had driven her out of bed that morning to preach the word...so she did. Between Howard and Bellmont on the upper north side in a train car full of commuters. 

It was beautiful. 

Now most of my fellow riders probably did not agree and a few were actually perturbed.  But she went on regardless driven by god's spirit she claimed. Now I do understand that she might have had some form of mental disturbance (but perhaps not because of get well dressed appearance and clarity of thought), but I couldn't help but wonder, is this the way that Peter talked about the gospel?  Peter who was so filled with the word that it burst out of him and not just on some train full of sleepy commuters but in a crowd of people who just days earlier had sentenced his Lord and teacher to death. Perhaps this came from his experience of the resurrected Christ? Perhaps he no longer feared death or physical harm as he had just days earlier because of his personal encounter with his lord?  Perhaps it was the holy spirit that upon entering Peter's body granted him the courage to speak out? All we can be sure of is that Peter was a dramatically transformed person in the course of a week.  He went from cowardly silent Peter to courageous outspoken Peter. But getting back to my story...I now desperately want to seek that woman out and ask her what happened in her life that led to her being so convicted by God that she preached his word to a generally apathetic audience on a upper north side train car?  Which brings me to my final thought I have had today.  

Apathy, the whole train car was rank with it.  It seems so strange that we would all collectively seemingly punish this "crazy" woman with our silence and our inability to look her in the eyes, afraid to attract the attention of somebody that passionate about a single subject.  Somehow the appreciation for passion was lost on us that morning.  My final question is where and when does that appreciation from passion disappear? At what moment or topic are we no longer able to acknowledge the passion of another as something to be cherished and recognized?  An important distinction must be made, it is not that I am saying we must participate or even agree with that individual but we should at least acknowledge their passion.  A child is pushed into their passions at every stage of life.  How often does little Johnny get driven to basketball practice, lug his instrument back and forth from school, or fill endless pages of paper with drawings or writing.  Never does anybody fail to acknowledge a child's drive for a particular arena of life, but yet when it becomes mature, when it becomes developed these people are pushed to the edges of our society and deemed irregular and not to be engaged with.  How many of the people on that train if they took an introspective moment would realize that that woman was more passionate about her spirituality than they were on their entire life.  How many of any of us can say that we are so passionate about anything that we would stand up in a train car and announce it to a group of sleepy strangers.  Not many of us at all would have that kind of flame in our life.

So in a way this post is two things, my own silent pitiful excuse of an acknowledgement of that woman's passion for her God and an encouragement for us to live outside of the box in our life's ambitions.  A reminder that great passion is seldom found in normal acts or situations and that if you want to elevate your life to the level of passion of those of the greatest of our heroes (Abe Lincoln, Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Michael Jordan, MLK jr., Tiger Woods, or any of the numerous figures that pursued their life with passion beyond ordinary measure) you must be willing to step outside of the box.  It is extraordinarily easy to dream, but the true measure of life is making good on those dreams and if we dream big we will need nothing short of extraordinary passion to realize our life's true potential.  May you find your passionate and be courageous enough to leave what is normal in order to pursue it. 

Foolishly Beautiful

Billy Collins recently came to do a poetry reading at our college campus. I loved his poems because they are so wonderfully simple. They delight the reader's imagination and yet at the same time our journey never leaves the living room or kitchen. His last poem that he read that night concludes, "We are all so foolish, my long bebop solo begins by saying, so damn foolish ,we have become beautiful without even knowing it." I am now listening to Please Forgive me by David Gray. The lyrics go, "Please forgive me if I act a little strange, for I know not what I do, feels like lightning running through my veins everytime I look at you. " I am always amazed when artists speak directly to my soul through their requisite medium. I am always surprised that they could be so effective at touching my heart so succintly even though we have never met. Whether it is an arresting line of poetry, beautiful love ballad, a painting rich in color, or a sculpture that is ready to walk off its podium and delight the world with its beauty and wisdom they all are amazing and worthy of praise and honor.

This idea of foolish beauty grabs my senses in a particularly profound manner because it is what my heart has been feeling now for many weeks. We are all so foolish (if you don't believe it come and view the college atmosphere on any given weekend) and yet we are all so beautiful. Even our very existence, a tremendous gift, is beauty. What if we all saw the world the way some artists do, the beauty in every line, in every movement, in every breath taken.

My favorite sermon I have ever heard was from JR Briggs regarding Vincent Van Gogh. JR explained that Van Gogh's life was filled with much sorrow and depression and yet in the times of his life that were light and joyful his paintings overflow with the color yellow. Even Starry Night, in all of its inky darkness the yellow shines through to capture the moment and illuminate the dark night in all of its splendor. I am not sure what caused Van Gogh to reach for his yellow paint brush at certain times and to cast it aside at others, but what I do understand is that we all must have something in our lives that causes the yellow to spring forth from ourselves.