Mar

1

The view of the bay was breathtaking. The evening breeze caressed her skin. She shivered. "I am sure he loves me," she said, "but I'll never manage to get out of this situation. It hurts so badly."

"I cannot command winds and weather," he started. "Nelson was the greatest Admiral of all times. He meant to say that you cannot change the facts of life. You have to adapt, understand the forces at play and use them to your advantage".

He would not follow the herd. When prices plunged 50% he bought those stocks although there was no real setup. From there the market panicked, the pain seemed to be unbearable. Nevertheless he did not close the trade. It would have been a blow to his self-esteem. Then the market printed a long rebound and he recovered half of his losses. The pain became less intense. With time wounds heal and only scars remind you what happened. Even if you are still losing big money.

He explained: "I learned from markets that taking a loss does not mean there is something wrong with you. Get rid of his ghost, wait for a set up and open a new trade. It is as simple as that."

He was lying to her and to himself. They were friends, but he had always considered the possibility of a different relationship. She was beautiful; there was something intriguing about her. But he was well aware there was no future. She would not be the right person. Her unhappiness, her attitude towards life would drain his energy and he was already exhausted. He needed a dreamer; someone that would give him strength, incentives to do things and not complain or regret something that had not happened or could never happen. Nevertheless, he stuck to this relationship. The same way he stuck to his loss in the stock market. It had been pretty painful at the beginning. Now he had scars to remind the pain and he was still uncomfortable. This would never go away.

Suddenly, as if she was reading his mind, she said: "I will love him forever. Nothing will change this. I must try to forget him even if I know it will not work. I need to replace him in my mind with someone else. That someone cannot be you". He had been awaiting his turn, sitting with his legs at the edge of an abyss and helping her whenever she allowed him to do it. It was like a flash, and he realized he had to do something about it. He turned on his IPhone, accessed the trading account and introduced a sell market order at the next day's open. He had decided to get rid of his long held position and to close a losing trade in his life.

Then he said: "There is no reason for me to be in this trade, I need to get out. I want to look to the future, to the next trade". He thought he would also be a better trader from now on. She looked at the dark sea: "It is your choice. I will not ask you to change your mind. Maybe one day…" He did not let her continue. "Hope is for losers in trading as in life. He managed to say, holding back his tears: "Once a trade is closed, you don't want to look back…to feel regret…or remorse."

He left without turning back. He could imagine her on the terrace, as beautiful as ever.

There was a lady in Sorrento wearing a pink dress at a party that night…

George Coyle asks:

This is great. I thought it might be literature but for the inclusion of the iPhone. The patterns in romance and trading are so similar. Good trades are easy to get into, they go in your direction almost immediately, and they require minimal effort and are a pleasure to have on. Thinking about them makes you feel good. Bad trades inspire doubt and rationalizing, can result in sleepless nights, and usually begin with immediate loss which results in more rationalizing such that even if you are down 50% a small rally inspires unwarranted optimism (even though you are still down 45%). And one generally winds up in emotional distress and makes rash decisions exiting at inopportune times. I have drawn the parallels many times; hope and human psychology seem to be at the core.

I think this is why systematic approaches are so popular in the short-term in trading, the human element is removed. But a systematic approach to dating doesn't really work. For one, by definition if you are in fact part of the dating pool, every relationship you had up until now has failed so it seems a fool's game to even play based on odds. It becomes worse if you have an adequate enough sample size to have approximated the population via the central limit theorem! And you could be viewed as cold and calculating, two things which seldom result in romantic success. Inevitably the initial honeymoon goes awry and a rolling stop results in the end of a relationship. And the vig can be very high so it might pay to approach relationships with a long-term hold investment bent post some initial time based rolling stop out (if one wanted to use a pseudo scientific method). But being a trader, one is always aware when the trade feels bad which can lead to dismay as the patterns usually don't lie!

Craig Mee writes:

The market mistress plays with one's inner demons. On a big turnaround, you can't help but get on, though your immediately exposed to the gun slingers, but as traders know the worst of the two evils is when that baby pops to the moon, and you're not on. To commit and face certain high winds or not commit and be left in the shallows. .. mmm I hate harbour.


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