The Most Valuable Asset
"But the wise person can lose nothing. Such a person has everything stored up for themselves, leaving nothing to Fortune, their own goods are held firm, bound in virtue, which requires nothing from chance, and therefore can't be either increased or diminished."
—SENECA, ON THE FIRMNESS OF THE WISE, 5.4
Today's meditation is heavy reading when we learn of Seneca's fate, from a deranged Nero. Being sentenced to death and ordered to commit suicide, is an example of how ruthless the Roman punishments were during those tough times!
When we look at "the most valuable asset" for us as traders, it is something that I touched on in my daily journal on 30 September. This is to protect and look after our mind; or as it is put in today's meditation, to invest in ourselves.
If we can gather the knowledge to make us more consistent and confident traders, this can be used to give us our edge and enable us to deal with our day to day market involvement.
Once we have our strategies in place, it is then a question of practising those strategies over and over again, repetitively, rinse and repeat. Familiarisation breeds confidence to react, to making the right decisions and this in turn develops a consistency in our trading, which will be evident in our results.
Here's where protecting and looking after our mind, comes into play. If we can keep our mind clear and focused on sticking to the rules/criteria for our strategies and be "in the zone" every time that we enter a trade, we are becoming more resilient, in our ability to deal with whatever the market throws at us!
So invest in yourself. I like to take some exercise, by going for a pre-trading walk of at least 30 minutes, to clear my mind. I also like to spend a few minutes meditating (there are some mp3's of short meditations for traders, to listen to, in the pinned section of this channel) which also helps massively with my trading mindset.
So, invest in yourself and protect and look after "the most valuable asset" that you have; your mind.
As you will often hear James saying at the end of his videos; "Happy trading!"