Yes….It Is Hot During Summer…

Apparently, this little piece of information is a complete and utter surprise to most Australians  judging by the level of commentary attached to the current hot spell sweeping the country. The point that most intrigues me is that Australians are constantly surprised by the fact that their country gets friggen hot during summer and each year they proclaim their surprise loudly and annoying. For example I live in what is referred to as one of Melbourne’s leafy green inner suburbs where the standard garden seems to be the English cottage style which about this time of the year looks as if it has been napalmed.  My neighbours as well as most conservative politicians seem to believe that Australia is a small island anchored off the Cornish coast as opposed to a bloody big, parched, mostly uninhabitable island in South East Asia. Even our maps tell a false tale in that they contain images of wonderful verdant countryside that apparently stretches for hundreds of kilometres inland. This is news to anyone who spends a lot of their time in the air actually looking at the countryside.

Each year we rail against the reality of our situation as if we are continually surprised each time it occurs. There is a profoundly irrational core to this belief since it reflects a simple inability to accept reality or to somehow believe that you control certain parts of your reality. There is the wonderful refrain – it should never be this hot. The problem is that it is this hot and will continue to be this hot long after we are gone. This is also a traders lament after all how often have you heard someone say that prices couldn’t possibly stay at this level – they have to recover. The natural order of things is that price can go where they want and you have no control over that. The issue here is acceptance of reality – in summer it gets hot and prices can and do go down. Acceptance of these simple facts makes life much easier.

Emotional conflict arises when your belief structure is at odds with reality and dealing with this involves finding out what the problematic belief is, offering some form of counter to it and then replacing it with a more useful and realistic belief. For example believing that the price of something you have bought could never go down is an unrealistic and destructive belief as there is a vast cornucopia of evidence to the contrary. The disputation comes about simply by looking at the evidence to the contrary and the new and liberating belief is that price moves and sometimes it moves against me. The movement against you is not the issue but rather your reaction to that movement. Life as a trader becomes much easier when this sort of regime is put in place.