DeniseKShull

At the risk of being impolitely self-promotional, the ultimate goal of the work in my book MARKET MIND GAMES is focused towards the goal of knowing the difference between an intuitive feeling and an impulsive one. I do believe John has described this very well - as setting yourself up to allow it to happen. I do also believe, and have researched with clients, the process of learning the feeling and emotional intelligence. I hope that is helpful. It's a catch 22 to answer the question with an answer like "in my book". Maybe the Amazon reviews overall will speak for themselves? Good luck, Denise

John - Such a great description of how it happens. And you are so right about leaving room in your trading plan for this. I think that is where so many teachings send us astray - telling us for it all to be planned when in fact that is a literal impossibility. Ditto on "I couldn't have said it better myself"! Denise

The brain and psychological research would say that a blend of conscious and unconscious competence is what you want. You can also use your conscious to to help your unconscious - ie sleep, breaks, tracking the feeling of sensing when you see a pattern develop as well as other feelings and emotions. With trading, I am not so sure this is the right way to parse it though. Relentless uncertainty causes your brain, thinking and feeling to react in a different way than something more precise. I think that working with the reality that you can never know for sure - all you can do is sense patterns. And, the fact that you will perceive patterns BEFORE your conscious tells you, is the place you want to shoot for. In other words, your objective should be to know the difference between an intuitive feeling and an impulsive one. You can consciously work on this. In doing so, you add a layer of knowledge that you can learn to integrate into a process. I don't mean to be vague - but it is a case of rethinking what it really means to think. We do half of that (not precisely, I say half to make a point) with our bodies. We haven't been taught however to use that in school and in fact have been taught the opposite.

The very latest in our understanding of perception and judgment (particularly under uncertainty) goes beyond Daniel Kahneman's metaphorical system 1 and sys 2. First there is "core affect" (or how we feel both physically and emotionally) and then there is the "gist" of the matter (Valerie Reyna, Cornell, 1990-2012 research). The hottest topics in neuroeconomics are mind/body cognition which in effect means thinking not only with our intellects but sorting out our senses, sense of something (like gist), emotion about it (which provides the meaning) and then what choice we want to make. The biggest two problems are: 1) When the brain senses uncertainty, which is always there in the markets, it automatically moves to look at the context and compels you to make a judgment call. 2)This is what derails you after you are in a trade - we were never taught to know what to do with the information our whole body and brain are delivering. The comparison of conscious vs. unconscious competence came however more out of things like riding a bicycle. At first you had to pay all of your attention. Today you are unconsciously competent. This can come in trading but not through the angles we typically try - due to the overemphasis on intellect and analytics. For example, research shows that complex decisions are best made non-deliberately. This means that when we want to decide how to get out of a trade we should get away from the screen and let what unconscious competence we have, come to our mind's forefront. All of this starts with realizing that trading is a much more physical endeavor (as is perception and thinking) than we normally realize. Treating our trading process as an athletic contest can also help our unconscious pattern recognition come to the surface in a way that we can depend on it. I could go on... but that is enough for my first post in years . Denise