Seasonal Beauty

Last Friday the seasons changed…I’m not sure why but it took me by surprise. The mornings became dark and a chill sets in around my thighs as I wait for the train. However it is still early and the steam rises up over the lake and creates a canvas upon which the sunlight applies oranges, pinks, greys, blues, and the occasional deep purples with broad, deft strokes. Each morning is a new portrait and the most wonderful part is that with each passing moment the portrait shifts, takes on an entirely different identity. Perhaps Monet understood this concept as he painted the same pond over and over again. Realizing that the same place held an infinite amount of beauty that could only be unlocked through years of observation under a variety of conditions; but eventually, I imagine he succumbed to the reality that he had not enough years, nor paint and canvas to capture the true beauty of the pond. This could be thought of as a moment of absolute despair, a true reckoning of a hopeless mortality. However I would like to believe that Monet, as an artist, was in pure exaltation.


The beauty of a mere pond unable to be accurately portrayed, grasped, or explained despite a lifetime of study… What does this say of God’s more complex creations, what of the morning sunrise, the waterfall in the wilderness, and of course that which all men find most beautiful in this world, woman. That I should be given ten score lifetimes to discover the beauty of woman and still fall short delights me. God, in his infinite wisdom, made beauty the most elusive prey. Happy Hunting I say!

Exploring Loneliness

The idea that God knows everything about me is perhaps the most comforting part of his nature. As the waves rolled into the shore of Lake Michigan today and the sun painted cotton candy pink across the hazy blue sky I reached back into the wellspring of memory. Walking down the beach holdings hands with the summer girl, watching Trapper sprint down the sand in the fading light out the back window of our jeep, the crab bake with the fire so high it burnt the clouds, a late night an empty heart and no one singing, the shock of water warmer than the air, a full moon, a dark sea, and my greatest friends of all time in arms reach, and an ocean so raw it was obvious the water was indeed God’s untamed spirit. These memories are forever locked into time and space and only I have the ability to recall them at will. This is the ultimate loneliness. A lifetime of memories and a quest to be understood, perhaps that is a definition of humanity. But of course our comfort must come from God the creator who is, in a word, amongst. This loneliness is what drives us towards spouses and community. It is the basic emotion that drives us to social groups instead of isolation and never have I understood it as much as I do know, writing alone on a beach with only the gull’s cries and the waves comforting brush against the earth.


It is getting cold as the sun sets. The cool breeze chills my skin, warning me of the frost, ice, and snow that is to follow in the months to come. My hair pulls back in the breeze and I am reminded of a similar night on a spit of sand surrounded by water on the Sea of Cortez. My hands are beginning to shake and the lightless decoy sets come to mind my gloved hands frozen between my Dad's steaming naked hands. The city glistens from the last rays of the fading sun and this new merger of myself, space, and time create another memory that will be recalled in some distant future. Just as the light fades so must we, but for now I will remember myself and trust that my memory is protected by my God and that collective will be treasured as much as I do now.

Walking back with my hands in my pockets I was dreaming of what could be and I passed two boys aged about five playing in their front yard. One came running out of the bushes holding the front of his pants and said “I gotta go inside. I got some on my pants. Guard my scooter buddy” I still have a smile on my face…it was a strangely beautiful moment. It does not surprise me one bit that Christ spent much of his time amongst children! I pray that in our adult lives we still have that “buddy” that will guard our scooter as we take time to clean ourselves up from one of life’s many pitfalls.

“Guard my scooter buddy.”

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.