Everlasting Good Health
"I tell you, you only have to learn to live like the healthy person does . . . living with complete confidence. What confidence? The only one worth holding, in what is trustworthy, unhindered, and can't be taken away — your own reasoned choice."
— Epictetus, Discourses
An interesting meditation today and it is reasoned choice that we use when we trade every day too!
By using the historical stats/data that we have available to us and then ensuring that every potential trade also fully meets the rules/criteria for our strategies, we are making an informed and reasoned choice.
It is then vital that we adopt a neutral mindset, once a trade goes in play, because as it actually states in today's meditation, "It's dangerous to have faith in what you do not control" and we can't control the outcome of a horse race or a football match etc. etc. So we divorce ourselves from this and trade what we are actually seeing happen, rather than what we hope/expect will happen.
What we can control however, is how we react if a trade is going against us and we can take a controlled loss at our pre-agreed exit point, to ensure that we protect our bank, before any unplanned damage is done!
There are a couple of lines from today's meditation which I love and they really resounded with me and I quote; "It's the only one that remains pristine and never wears down-- it's only the user that quits it; never will it quit the user."
This is reasoned choice in a nutshell. It remains pristine and never wears down, because we stick to it repetitively and rigidly, to reinforce our decision making. It will always be available to us and it will never quit us and it is only us that can quit, by stopping using it. But why would we stop using our reasoned choice when it is the bedrock of how we decide which trades to execute?
By sticking doggedly to what we know works long term for us, we will be profitable as we evolve and develop on our trading journey. You can do it for sure!