Trading for Everyone by Adam Hamilton (Part 4)

Trading feeds your brain, as it demands constant yet fascinating learning. I call myself “a student of the markets” as I continue to learn new things every day even after decades of trading. If I lived and traded through 10 lifetimes, I’d still be a student of the markets. We humans are all hard-wired to love to learn, to expand our horizons. And trading provides learning in droves. There are always new market situations to observe, new companies to analyze, and new factors driving the performance of stocks.

The more you trade, the more you will learn about the world around you. You will gradually start to better understand the global economy, national economy, business in general, and how things work. Traders view the world in a different light, pondering how the goods and services we need and want are created and ultimately delivered to us at a reasonable profit. Every time you buy something, every time you interact with someone, your mind will constantly be sifting everything for trading opportunities.

Learning is naturally empowering and self-feeding, the more you know the more you want to know. And knowledge and diligence ultimately lead to success, which builds self-confidence. Once you start making money trading stocks, and you will if you apply yourself and stick with it, your whole worldview starts to change. As your income becomes less dependent on your time on task, as the markets reward you for the merit of your own decisions, I guarantee you will feel better about yourself and life in general.

And this gift of learning extends far beyond the external, markets and stocks. The greatest challenges for trading lie in your own heart. Your success depends on harnessing your own internal greed and fear, your greatest enemies. As naturally-emotional creatures, mastering our own emotions isn’t easy. But the more you trade, the more you will learn about yourself. It literally forces you to look deep into your own heart, to try and dispassionately analyze the motivating forces driving your buying and selling decisions.

The more you learn about yourself, the deeper you journey into your own emotions, the happier you will ultimately be. This quest for emotional mastery yields benefits far beyond the trading realm. The longer you trade, the better you become at stepping back and calmly analyzing life situations that make you angry, sad, frustrated, whatever. Controlling your own greed and fear helps you better control all your emotions, making you more even-keeled and slower to get upset in the future. Imagine the benefits this has for marriages, family interactions, business relationships, and everything else!