Everybody gets what they want...

The title of my post is a snippet borrowed from a quote by Ed Seykota - Ed is a legendary trend-following trader and is credited with developing one of the first computerized trading systems.

Ed has been featured in a number of publications, has generated phenomenal (to say the very least) returns through his trading and mentors a whole lot of successful traders, among other things. Ed is awesome. Read Jack Schwager's Market Wizards for more on Ed if you're interested (it's well worth it). Many, including me can only hope to be mentored by someone of Ed's caliber.

Anyway I stole^H^H^H borrowed my title from one of Ed's many insightful (and rather unique) quotes:
"Win or lose, everybody gets what they want out of the market."

Simple...but powerful. Because at the end of the day, everybody does get what they want out of most aspects of life, not just the market...except that we generally don't realize the intricacies of how this came to be. Sometimes we also don't want to acknowledge or accept it either, as Ed also alludes to. But at the end of the day, we sure do get what we want, positive or negative.

I'm not going to go into aspects of psychology, NLP and the like, but let's just say that our entire experience of life is shaped and stems from chain reaction of things that are rooted in our beliefs. Your mind filters inputs based on either corroborating and supporting something you'd like to happen to make you feel good, or protecting you from something that would hurt and make you feel bad. There are many books that attest to this, and many examples I can give of basic principles, but I won't. Suffice to say...the map is not the terrain.

Anyway, I got what I wanted this week. Of late, work has been a little quiet. I'm a 0 or 100 person. No middle-ground. If it's not 100, it may as well be 0. So, quiet doesn't work for me - not in the slightest. I found myself grumpy because I felt like I wasn't doing anything useful and this of course led to a chain reaction where I felt I wasn't particularly productive. Of course, things just got even slower. Then I realized I was getting what I wanted. *bleh*

Needless to say, this week I started trying to do things to create work. Again, with the shift in perspective, I got what I wanted. I'm now in the middle of many, many, many things, and productive as hell, and I love it. I even managed to get myself an apartment on the Upper East Side as part of the mix in between. Life is peachy, as I prep myself to head to Vegas.

Of course, one can start an entire argument about how this applies to trading, and in the same way to hax0ring, and again in the same way to pretty much anything you want to do. Other aspects come into play...but that is beyond the scope of this blog posting (again, many well written volumes exist).

Ok, so I've been quiet lately, I'm sorry. But this is all for now. I think that if one thinks about the theme of this post carefully, a myriad of other thought processes will be spawned. Use it...don't use it...but don't knock it unless you understand it and have tried it.

Thank you, and good night!