Unnecessary Complication
An extract from Trading Instincts, How to Become a Master Trader, by Curtis Faith
The great irony of trading is that it is difficult precisely because it is so very simple.
The left brain often has a real problem with this concept. It doesn’t make sense to the logical top-down left brain that it is simple to make money trading. Our logical mind imagines that if trading were simple, more traders would be successful, so trading must be complicated. The left brain measures expertise in terms of only the type of knowledge that it values: categorisations, classifications, causal relationships and temporal correlations—logical knowledge. The left brain assumes that trading requires a lot of its type of knowledge. It also assumes that a lot of analytical complication is required to trade well.
The left brain doesn’t realise that the relative lack of attention given to the importance of the right brain in trading, not the lack of information, makes trading difficult for most people. The left brain doesn’t put sufficient value on qualities that are the right brain’s domain: big picture perspective, bottom-up thinking and pattern matching. These are the skills that are required to become a master trader
Most people are missing right-brain instinct and the confidence to trust that instinct. Hopefully earlier chapters offer a good framework for helping your left brain understand the importance of intuition and the right brain’s bottom-up approach to thinking. Through proper training, you can build on this framework to help increase your left brain’s trust in the right brain’s capabilities. Through practice and habituation, you will soon learn to trust your instincts as much as you trust your head and to trust your unconscious mind as much as you do your conscious, directed one.
The left brain’s lack of appreciation for the right brain’s big picture expertise can be a source of major problems. The left brain feels a deep conflict when presented with the simple truths of trading success. It wants tricks and expertise that it can understand. It wants complication.
This is the reason so many traders seek gurus. Their logical brains don’t believe that trading can be simple, so they try to seek out the hidden knowledge that must be missing from their trading. Lacking this secret information, traders often are hesitant and unconfident in their trading. The internal conflict between what their left brain tells them is required and the simple truth that trading is actually very simple undermines this confidence. So traders seek out others who can tell them what they think they must be missing. They believe that if they get the secret information, they will know enough to trade confidently.
Despite what some people might tell you, no secrets are involved. The art of the trade comes from simplicity, not complication, and from seeing the big picture.
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