“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer” – William S. Burroughs
While a typical trader may use stop losses or sell limits, the emotional investment philosophy says bullshingles to such strategies. A famous decision maker once posited that when trading on emotion, only losers would take losses. In other words…
ONLY LOSERS SELL.
Winners, on the other hand, learn. Learning, as many readers may recall, is not the same as losing. Around the globe, millions of students pay for an education in a wide variety of topics. Whether they are enrolled at Harvard University, as in the case of my personal inspiration, David Rockefeller, or the prestigious Universidad Estatal de Haiti, students of all shapes and sizes regularly pay in both time and money for the privilege of gaining skills and knowledge. No reasonable person would take the perspective that these students are losing something, rather, there is an exchange of goods and services. Likewise, in emotional investing, there are no losers, only learning opportunities.
Visualization is a powerful tool. Sight, being one of our god-given senses, influences our personal identities considerably. As a result, it has been argued that visualization of success is at times more important that success in and of itself. Self actualization through visualization can change a car-accident into an insurance-claim opportunity, a death in the family to a considerable inheritance, and a losing trade into a winner.
The ability to see every trade as winning trade, even when a trade has turned against you, is without doubt a skill which every emotional investor must internalize. Dreams of absolute perfection beget absolute perfection.