As many of you know who’ve taken my Tensile Trading seminar or watched the DVD, the tenth stage of stock market mastery pulls together all previous nine stages. As the title of this blog suggests, Stage 10 incorporates all three essential ingredients: motivation, confidence and action. Successful investors must leverage each of these:
1. They need the motivation to seek out meaningful investment tools and real market knowledge.
2. They must have the confidence to dig deeper into complex investing methodologies and explore their own investor self.
3. They must embrace a personal action plan to convert their knowledge into bankable experience.
Let’s explore each of these in turn.
Motivation:
I challenge you to think seriously about your investing potential – not in terms of where you are today but rather where you could be tomorrow. Academic knowledge on its own will not grow your assets. You must be appropriately motivated to put your shoulder into it and build actual investing experiences.
I’d like to pose three important questions to you. How do you plan to get motivated? How do you intend to stay motivated? How do you resolve to get re-motivated if obstacles get in your way? Answering these questions and discovering your individual sources of motivation will in fact determine the degree to which your future investment endeavors succeed and your aspirations are met.
You can’t just watch the investment game – you need to get motivated, get focused and get into the game. Just look at the high tech arena in places like Silicon Valley. There are innumerable examples of talented individuals doing things they never thought possible until they got motivated. But the motivation for you to achieve success cannot come from someone else. It must emanate from your own deep determination to become a consistently successful investor.
Confidence:
Confidence is all about your self-vision and becoming the investor you know you can be. The old adage that “you become the company you keep” has been validated by academics ad infinitum. If you have the confidence to hang out with other smart and enterprising individuals, then their assured demeanor will rub off on you. You must be willing to upgrade your relationships and become a talent hunter. Search out other successful investors and pay attention to the wisdom they can share with you.
Please don’t make the mistake of surrounding yourself with lesser individuals just to make yourself feel smarter – that’s a surefire way to underachieve as an investor and person. As my mother often used to remind me, find those peers who will pull you up to their level, not pull you down.
Don’t spend your life in the shallow end of the pool. Get ignited, be fearless and have the self-confidence to swim to the deep end. Your portfolio will be rewarded.
About two years ago, I set out to surround myself with a circle of smart and fearless investors. I extended invitations to a group of first-tier traders and organized them to meet on a monthly basis. The group is not an investment club per se. We are not pooling money to invest. Instead, we meet to share our expertise, our passion and our insights together with the purpose of expanding and deepening our collective investing knowledge. For my own investing, this group experience has provided a wonderful boost in more ways than I can describe. Investing can be a lonely endeavor if you let it; the best antidote is to surround yourself with other talented individuals.
It’s troubling to me that a number of recent academic studies have found that as many as one out of every three Americans wrestles with insecurity. They allow mountains of uncertainty, fear and doubt to rob them of their confidence. They lack the self-confidence to believe in themselves and in their ability to hike over the hills where success is waiting on the other side. This has ramifications in the personal investing arena as in every other aspect of their lives, and those ramifications can exact a financial toll.
Those of you who have read my previous blogs, you know that I believe it’s essential for successful investors to write out and maintain a detailed investment plan. Having a structured plan in hand brings clarity, vision and a life-confidence to your investing in a manner that nothing else does. Whether your plan is focused on protecting your assets or on growing your assets, it should explicitly set forth the investing tools and parameters that can help you reach your goals successfully.
It’s my belief that self-confidence and a positive outlook are one and the same coin. You need both to offset the prevalence of negative forces that bombard us daily in today’s world. I implore you to make confidence be that voice in the back of your head that you listen to.
Action:
Over the years, I have met some highly motivated investors who seem to ooze with confidence but are nevertheless unable to pull the trigger. For a variety of complex personal reasons, they’re incapable of engaging their confidence and converting their vast investment knowledge into profitable investing experiences.
In the stock market, knowledge is the new currency. Knowledge itself has immense value, but just like money, it can’t work its magic if you keep it in your pocket. It is only when you take your wallet out of your pocket and act upon the knowledge that you release the value of that currency. Your actions in the market are what will ultimately fulfill your goals and dreams. An inability to act upon that knowledge and wisdom is like winking at someone in the dark. Nobody but you knows and nothing happens.
At a recent seminar, I listened to a talk by motivational expert Les Brown who said, “If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. If you do what is hard, life will be easy.” I find that this simple yet profound statement encapsulates what is essentially required to achieve mastery in the stock market. It’s not enough to just take action. Often what’s more important is to take those actions that are difficult and counter-intuitive – the type of trades that average investors inherently shrink away from. It’s easy to listen to the pundits on CNBC and take action by following their advice-of-the-day. Remember, they’re pandering to their sponsors. What’s much harder is to use your investment toolkit and follow your methodology no matter how reluctant you might feel about executing the trade.
I knew a very successful investor who told me that her most profitable trades over the years were those that went against the herd mentality of the moment. Her best investments were made when she ignored her broker’s advice and based decisions solely on her personal analysis instead. She knew how to follow her methodology and spend her currency.
The action you take today is often predetermined by the actions you’ve taken in your past. If you’ve always followed the easy road, you may not be inclined to veer off it. It’s your cumulative experiences from your previous actions that will guide the appropriateness of your present course. Consider therefore that what you do today will in fact create a very real prophecy for your success (or lack thereof) tomorrow. In other words, today’s actions are the foundation upon which you build your potential to achieve great things in the months and years ahead. Today, choose wisely!
The Triple Crown paradigm I present you with respect to motivation, confidence and action will likely require a change in your mental investor blueprint. It will be a process, but I implore you to think of these three essential elements as all branches of the same tree. My hope is that you will accept it wholeheartedly and thereby achieve your investment goals and the financial freedom you envision for yourself and your family.
Trade well; trade with discipline!
- Gatis Roze
Developer of the StockCharts.com Tensile Trading ChartPack.
Presenter of the Tensile Trading DVD, Stock Market Mastery.
P.S. Click HERE for information on my future appearances & seminars.
October 17th, 2015- ASSET ALLOCATION WORKSHOP with Gatis Roze & Chip Anderson.
P.P.S. For both convenience & consistency, please click HERE to automatically receive my blog once a week as soon as it comes out.
