In The Trading Cockpit with the O'Neil Disciples: Strategies that Made Us 18,000% in the Stock Market

CHAPTER 2

Mind Games and Mazes

Our experience dealing with thousands of individual and professional investors has led us to a very simple conclusion: The vast majority of traders have not developed the proper psychology necessary to achieve success in the stock market. This is no surprise, since the psychology and attitudinal conditioning necessary for human survival on a primal level, for example, in everyday life, is entirely at odds with the psychology and attitudinal conditioning required to make money in stocks. Humans, from the get-go, are ill-equipped to deal with the mind games and mind mazes that the market throws at them where they are faced with the pressure of real-time investing, under fire and with real money on the line.

Over the past two years since writing Trade Like an O'Neil Disciple and launching our website (www.virtueofselfishinvesting.com), we have come into contact with thousands of investors who in turn have showered us with thousands of questions about trading and investing. In the process, we have developed an intimate awareness of how most individual investors, mostly amateurs but also a number of professionals, think about the markets in the most visceral of terms. Their fears, trepidations, illusions, and delusions all come through in these questions. From these questions we have been able to build a literal database of common psychological errors made by investors of all stripes to develop what we feel is a reasonably accurate profile of the average ...