Detroit: it’s what you insisted on

It’s sad to see my home town descend into such disgrace. It wouldn’t be this bad if Republicans were in charge and were really as evil as Democrats are incompetent.  Unemployed and not looking 47%  35% on foodstamps; 1000s of homes abandoned’. Population cut in half in 20 yrs

“Leaders” crying out for more dole

Meanwhile Democrat poster boy Warren Buffett is engaging in the completely legal tax avoidance behavior that is getting Google pilloried fpr prudent fisuciarily responble decisions about what to do with their money.

How 

dare people act in such a way as to deny government every possible dollar?  the nerve!

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Dr Kenneth Ginsburg on resilience

just listened to a brilliant and human presentation on resilience and children by Dr Kenneth Ginsburg, and what we can do to help them weather life storms, deliberately and intentionally.  Directly connects how I go about coaching my youth soccer teams, using athletics as the vehicle for important life lessons. his work is definitely worth your time

Reflecting on pride…

examine the difference between “the source of pride” and “the need for pride”

2 related but quite different feelings that satisfy different needs?

do they arise from different places from within?

we can’t choose our feelings but we can work on breaking the automatic linkage between feelings and action through mindful effort

we can learn to notice the onset of feelings and disengage from the routine. robotic, instinctive follow-on action

we can learn to simply notice the arrival of the feeling and wait for our centered, calm state to re-establish itself and then decide on how to respond with our intentional mind

how can we learn to let the feelings run their course?

How does that compare to a strategy of “controlling” or “preventing emotions”?

How might that skill benefit us as professional consultants?

Victor Frankl has important, timeless things to say on this, as does the Buddha, to name just a couple sages

The source of moral authority?

It’s horrible when your “spiritual advisor”  is more concerned about preventing scandal than doing the right thing

Insert commentary on “Hate the sin, not the sinner” here, and how that doesnt invalidate “the message”

Sharing my BrainMode power report

wanted to share out my BrainMode power (BMp) report.

BRAIN MODE power for Professional Development for Ken Long

Quite a few folks had expressed interest in learning more about BMp, so I thought I would share mine and how I will use it in my trading practice

As/if you read further, Notice the auditory, visual, kinesthetic language; notice the implicit and explicit beliefs…

===================================================================

I took it this morning, when in a trading frame of mind

To me, the market is a learning laboratory for self-discovery; It allows us to experience its nature thru whispers, glimpses, and nudges in the results we get from our trading.

I have become even more auditory than I was 2 years ago when I first took this instrument; i attribute this to doing more recordings for Youtube for trading and teaching, and to the amount of time I have been spending in my doctoral program reading complex material. As I read, I hear the words and concepts in my head, I see how they connect (or not) to my cognitive/emotional maps, as I try to fit them into my paradigms, worldviews, cognitive  word-nets/cognitive maps.

I conceptualize top-down and then fiddle to see how the eaches fit in, listening for reactions, looking for jagged edges & anomolies, feeling for friction, tension and goodness of fit. I test to see how it works locally and then scale up to listen and look for effects across other domains, and see how the new “whole load” is distributed across my load-bearing members.

I will go thru this report in detail over the next 2 weeks and  use it as a lens to compare to my trading practice, in order to uncover more insights about how I may better plan, prepare, execute and reflect upon my results

The BrainMode Power for Professional Development comes with a series of 14 weekly followups with additional insights  and exercises, tips and recommendations that can be applied, in order systematically deepen my self awareness of learning styles, preferences, my beliefs about them and how they intersect with and are manifested in my trading practice.

Calibrating my practice, as it were

Each of the folks coming to the research weekend and the live trading week have been sent their links to take the instrument and have a chance to play along and learn.

I will be keeping my notes in my learning journal, and will use that to focus my efforts.

My learning journal has 3 columns:

1. The event/experience/insight in rich detail

2. What I think and feel about it, and how it connects to my world view

3. What I will do about it

These reflect the Kolb Experiential Learning Model in a condensed form, one of the leading adult learning models in use these days.

mountains and efficiency

Image via Wikipedia

I am thinking about “efficiency” in time(t) as Gain/TrueRange(sum)

the TrueRange = sum of distance travelled on the way to getting the gain

think of a perfect ramp from groundlevel to mountaintop

think of rolling hills from groundlevel to mountaintop

think of a series of identically high mountains from ground level to mountaintop

think of 5 mountain twice as high as the mountain you end up on

how hard did you have to work to get to the final mountain top?

that’s efficiency

the load you are carrying along the way = (your fears x your greed x your hope)

the load each trade is carrying = sumproduct of all your emotions

the more emotions you are carrying, the harder each trade is “to lift”

without your emotions, the trade is simply the ruleset at work

when you add your emotions each trade is working harder because of the extra load you have introduced

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breathing = trading

• ask yourself: “what is the crowd waiting for?” “What do they need to see?”
• What would confirm in their mind that the trade is NOW?!”
• learn to see it before it happens
• create separation between you and the crowd
• be on the edge of them, so you can sense the mood, but don’t be inside the crowd
• be aware of the crowd but be OF the crowd
• be positioned in the quiet moment before they take off running
• let their energy propel your position
• if you are using “Red-Doji-Green-Go” on the 5s, consider the 1s or 3s as you see the front end of a doji occurring
• what’s a doji look like as it is beginning to form?
• a change in the downtrend that was the big red candle….failure to fail further, created the beginning of the doji
• that’s the time to dial in and listen carefully
• do you hear the absence of further failure?
• do you hear the quiet pause between exhale (fear, selling, money flowing out) and the inhale?
• (beginning to generate the energy of the next leg up)
• this is the “natural respiratory pause”
• this is the moment we train in marksmen
• to pull the trigger at a moment of stability
• in between the exhale and inhale
• it’s the most stable moment in the body
• there are 3 points in the breath: inhale, pause, exhale
• in your practice of meditation, do some breath work:
• 4 counts inhale, 4 counts pause, 4 counts exhale, 4 counts pause
• learn to recognize and feel each state
• learn the quality of the pause
• feel your smooth emotional state
• sip the air in, hold, let it seep out, hold
• now feel price breathing
• learn to dial in to the pace of the breath in the cycle that seems to be in force
• sometimes at the opening its 5s and 1s; later it may be 15s and 5s, or 60 and 15
• try Ken Cohen’s CDs on breathing meditations
• monitor the breathing of the crowd
• but don’t breath with them
• stay true to your cycle of breathing
• dont match their pace
• watch cats stalking and watch their breathing

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Traders Roundtable: six tangible benefits of reflective journaling

Image via Wikipedia

Reflective journaling is the process of deliberately recording your thoughts and feelings and then analyzing them in a process called double loop learning.

With reflective learning, we examine our feelings and responses and then we look at how we act upon this newfound knowledge improving our self awareness and self-consciousness. Reflective journaling, them helps us to develop at to different levels simultaneously.

this growth and self awareness of self consciousness is important to the trader, because the individual psychology of the trader is such an important component of almost every kind of trading system. A shorter term your trading system operates in, the more important your psychology becomes. Reflective learning, therefore is an important component of building your traders toolkit.

Reflective journaling is a powerful technique for improving your reflective learning.

Here are six tangible benefits you can expect to achieve:

• Your focus and attention will improve. Concentration and attention are important qualities of good traders.
• You will refine your beliefs and develop an inquiring mind. Knowing your beliefs explicit label improve your ability to select trading systems that fit you.
• You will exercise both your creative and critical thinking skills. You need to be creative to come up with new trading ideas, and then critical in order to find weak spots and blind spots and leverage points.
• You will improve your discipline. Discipline will help you survive difficult times as a trader and will give you the strength of will to continue to execute under conditions of uncertainty.
• You will learn to act on evidence that has been weighed and measures. Adopting a scientific frame of mind will help you eliminate emotions from your trading where they are harmful and what you focus on results instead.
• You will be growing your body of knowledge. There’s no substitute for broad experience in the markets; you need diverse vacationing your portfolio and in your professional knowledge.
• You will learn to make more and more distinctions. one of the definitions of intelligence is the ability to make more and more distinctions between concepts, context and situations.

Good trading!

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Transparency in your personal life: an act of courage

Image by Will Lion via Flickr

Transparency was one of the stated values of our most recent senior leader in the college, and as I look back at his two-year career here, as he prepares to depart, I can see that he really lived that value area it made it very easy to work with them on any directed project, because I didn’t have to worry about is hidden agendas or behind the scenes politicking.

What he said is what he meant and because it was always focused on the good of the college students, it was easy to get on board with his ideas. He was a guy who took advice carefully and sought the opinions of others before he made his decisions. He made sure to share the reasoning and processes behind his decision-making with those of us in the college, so that even if he decided against our recommendation, we felt like we had a fair shake. Research shows that that’s an important part of keeping your people satisfied.

How can we work on transparency in our own lives?

There are several dimensions that matter it seems to me: self-knowledge, purpose and courage.

We need self-knowledge to make sure that what we think were broadcasting is what’s really inside of us. We can’t be consistent in our external actions unless we really know what’s going on inside ourselves.

Purpose matters because we want to make sure that our integrated in turn the external actions are aligned with something that matters to us, such as our mission or are proposed Legacy.

Courage is involved in transparency because you have to take risks by exposing your inner workings and your purpose to the external world. Not everyone’s going to agree with your support you, there will be those who cast stones and belittle your efforts. Being transparent means exposing your true self to these slings and arrows. If you are being sneaky about your purpose and your goals, the critique of others wouldn’t be as personal because you could always tell yourself that it’s critique of the shadow face that you present to the world. Transparency puts your innermost self at risk to those who would criticize.

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What to say at halftime when we’re losing

Image via Wikipedia

It’s my opinion that your halftime speech should be the same each game, regardless of the score. And I say that because I think you should be focusing on the things that really matter and that is: are the players executing the game plan that we have agreed upon and are they putting in their best efforts as players and members of our team?

So I believe that your halftime speech should be focusing on those elements and not on the score. The score is the outcome of all the little things that you should be focusing on such as effort, technique and game plan. If you take care of those things, the score will be what it should be at the end of the game more often than not.

If you’re focusing on the score then you’re communicating that winning is what is most important and not the quality of their play and their attention to detail.

I believe therefore that your speech at halftime should be in the form of questions. You should be asking your players to evaluate their performance, to identify what’s working and what’s not working, to focus on a few things that we want to do better in the second half and to suggest ways that we can reinforce our strengths and improve our weaknesses.

I like to ask my players to grade themselves in the areas of effort, having fun, supporting the team, respecting the other team and reminding them how much we love this game.

Inevitably, players are going to know the score and it’s going to affect them because they’re under a lot of pressure from family and friends in school to focus on the scoreboard. It’s a central part of our culture in many ways.

What we can do is athletic coaches them is help them place the score into context here to improve on the score means we have to improve the way we play fundamentally and his team and those are the things we should focus on. Our morale will improve when our play improves and so that should be the focus of our speech and our play in the second half.

Remember that by making it a player’s responsibility to identify what must be done then we have taught them to carry their own burden and we’ve made them stronger people and better teammates.

Isn’t that what we want from our sports programs anyway?

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