rationale

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There are many good, readily available books on technical analysis. For twenty pounds you can immerse yourself in the study of a wide variety of indicators. You can swot up on formulas, tweak them around, even make up a few of your own. You can become proficient in the recognition of patterns of behaviour, represented as lines, bars and candles. You can backtest, simulate and fantasise. You can suggest to yourself a plan, a strategy, a mindful modus operandi where you, as the central character in an anonymous cast of millions, can apply these new found skills to master the trading game.

Sadly, or perhaps fortunately for some of us, it rarely works out as the textbooks suggest. It's a familiar, usually woeful tale. The RSI was overbought, there was screaming divergence and still it continued up and you were stopped, again. There is a dis-appointment, a non meeting with some anticipated, apparently hypothetical destiny.

Some choices present themselves. You could quit. However at this stage it is probably unlikely that you will be able to ditch the recently nurtured image of yourself as a master trader. So, you delve more deeply into your study of technical analysis. You splash out on a "proper" bit of charting software. You burn some midnight oil devising your own "system", take a few precautionary, paper traded punts and gird your loins for a more protracted plunge into the promised land of squiggly lines and logic.

Perhaps success invites you for a closer acqaintance and lures you with its siren song. But your software somehow throws a fit of randomness and lo and behold your'e washed up on the rocks of penury and penitence.

Battered, bewildered, betrayed, bereft. A lost and lonely soul grappling for certainty. Further, more demanding choices and questions present themselves. What are you made of ? Why has this happened ? How could you have gone so wrong ? Why did you let yourself lose so much money ?

There are always invitations and opportunities though we may not see them because we are too busy looking for something else. We look for something to believe in, a kindly ferryman to guide our boat accross the choppy sea. We fear the thrust and the undertow of the waves. We must preserve and focus on safe passage. We cling tightly to the familiar and get familiarly rewarded.

Or, we find a way, some way in ourself to accept the waves, to become fascinated and entranced by their dancing momentum, to see their crashing spray as an endlessly benevolent play that we too can enjoy. As we befriend and are befriended by that which we have resisted our possibilties expand. We can view what we have been doing from a different angle. We gain perspective. We can also open to the new, we can allow ourselves to reframe our perceptions. We can even experiment with being frameless. We can come to the resource that all these other false dawns have gradually been pointing us to. The place where the game of trading and life is won or lost. Our own mind.