Mind matters – how your mind sees (trading)

Let’s first clear up some big misperceptions about the mind and how your mind sees trading and the entire world. These misperceptions have created many a flawed concept about how lasting (trading) success is created which needs debunking.

You will realise why the mind alone is of little use in the fast manifestation of trading profits. In fact, our false ideas on the workings of the mind can slow down progress considerably and cause much unnecessary pain which could be avoided.

By far the biggest misperception is the idea that your mind is the key to everything:

Alas, the mind is nothing else but an aid:

The mind is a tool, but not THE tool.

Think of it as a part of your tool box: You cannot build a house with a hammer alone. You will soon run into the hammer’s limitations, even though it has proven to be an immensely useful tool until you ran into its limitations.

Pretty much every client of mine, when they first come to me, believes that the feedback they get from their brains is real, solid and absolute.

This erroneous belief sets them up to be victims and powerless servants of their master, their minds.

Humans have been trained to believe in victimhood, hard work and well, lack…

Our limited perception has fed us the illusion that the mind gives accurate feed back.

Well, it doesn’t: Neuro science studies have de-coded the messaging system of the mind: It interprets everything that is sees through a filter system. The filter system is unique and not universal. Yes, your mind sees in pictures, before you observe that picture in your conscious awareness. (I explain how the mind works in detail in my book “The BuddhistTrader.”)

The picture your mind sees has no emotional content to begin with. It doesn’t know what it is looking at. The interpretation of the pictures in your mind’s eye derives from your conditioning that has created your views and your identity over thousands of years of evolution.

Your conditioned mind has learnt to make sense of what it sees through a complex filter system that either adds, or deletes information to fit into the “correct” interpretation of what it sees. The “correct” interpretation of the untrained mind is inevitably the interpretation it has learnt from infanthood.

Alas, here is the interesting piece:

The mind is non local. Your body/mind matrix has sensors in every single cell of your body which contain the blue print for every part of your body. You are actually using millions of mini brains to create what you call “reality”.

Reality creation is a constant exchange of information between intelligent energy inside of your mind/body matrix and the environment around you.

The untrained mind is only consciously aware of its linear, logical part. Typically the “feeling” sensors are dormant, and only activated to a degree in persons who have done a lot of cognitive awareness work.

The thoughts you are aware of are a result of feelings and emotions and internal pictures and sound. The feelings and emotions create the inner visions, the pictures in your mind. The linear part of your mind gives these pictures meaning according to its conditioning. You act, mostly on autopilot to these triggers.

95% of what you see, think and do is subconscious

Your feelings and emotions are your direct connection to source energy. Source energy is subtle. It permeates everything in the universe, material, and non-material. It is intelligent and malleable. When you communicate correctly with source energy big positive shifts can happen very fast.

Source energy is the subtle energy of creation and the building block of the universe. Matter, your three D reality is simply the result of an alignment of source energy into physical form.

Your conditioning has corrupted your ability to manipulate source energy in an effective way.

This is so because you have been given incorrect information and incorrect tools to create success, health and anything else in your life.

Today the wisdom traditions are being proven once again to be correct in their understanding of the universe and our minds. The old techniques used in Egypt, the Toltec Indian traditions, the HUNA traditions, (supposed to be the oldest from of NLP, Neuro Linguistic Programming) and the like are now being re-discovered through the science of quantum physics.

Your reality is created in the subconscious, subtle energy level, which I call source creation.

When you become aware of the different qualities of subtle energy inside you and around you, you can make changes in your life long before mismatched energy frequencies create disharmony and chaos.

This is why you should take the time to learn consciousness expansion techniques, like mindfulness techniques. They will open up a new expanded awareness and bring more information into your field of mental vision.

The discipline of “biogeometry” has studied the effects of subtle energy over the past 35 years or so. The traditions of Feng Shui,  HUNA and many other ancient traditions use the principles of biogeomtery to create profound transformation, harmony and piece. My “Holistic Feng Shui” techniques are based on biogeometry.

Harmony and success is created through the harmonisation of several energies: Mental harmony awareness inside, awareness of energy outside, using physical objects to harmonise chaotic energy fields.

Early detection of disharmony is key for a smooth life and career.

Nature will seek harmony naturally. The human body and mind seeks harmony naturally.

Modern technology has created a massive chaotic energy field around us that is affecting our ability to expand, self soothe, relax and step into wholeness and manifest success. Wholeness here means being in harmony with your mind/body/environment.

When you are in harmony at these three levels you will begin to relax and expand your conscious awareness and start receiving opportunities which your overly stressed mind/body matrix is simply not able to take in right now.

While you believe that your thoughts are real and true you are locked in a vicious circle of fear, anxiety, stress and hard work.

In other words: You are being swept away by the overpowering density of a low vibrating collective consciousness. This low vibration literally is cutting you off from the success frequency.

The only way to change this is by changing the way you perceive reality and take action to move from the linear, logical, lopsided thinking into whole brain thinking. Learn to work with subtle energy, the true seat of success creation.

Exploiting psychological flaws for betting profit

In October 2014 Pinnacle’s Head of Sportsbook contributed to the article “Three Must-Read Books for Bettors”, recommending Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, and Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise. While you might not agree with this selection, (I would substitute Silver’s book for another Taleb classic: The Black Swan), it is notable that none of these books deal explicitly with sports betting. Instead, they deal with behavioural psychology, the innate flaws in our thinking, and man’s inability to forecast the future while often being confident in doing so. So why should these books be so important to successful sports betting? The answer is that by understanding natural human psychological biases we can both control them in ourselves and exploit them in others. In this article I will give examples of how natural flaws in our thinking affect betting patterns and how these flaws can be exploited for profit.

Example 1: Loss Aversion and How Not to Eat Like a Chicken.

Humans don’t like to lose. In fact, the pain of a loss is greater than the pleasure found in an equivalent win. For this reason many bettors prefer to win bets rather than to win money – they back poorly-priced favourites to gain a high win rate but poor return. It is easy to win 60% of your bets while losing money. To coin a phrase, they eat like a chicken and dump like an elephant.

Exploiting Loss Aversion: If you are mentally prepared to lose many more bets than you win while knowing that your winning bets will more than cover your losses then this can lead to excellent yields and strong profits. In practice, this means backing an outcome the bookmakers consider unlikely, which will often be mispriced in your favour.

Example 2: Shock Results Are No Surprise

How often do you hear an over-excited commentator proclaiming a “huge shock” at full time on Saturday afternoon? Pretty often in my experience. The fact is that rare events happen more regularly than we think, and this includes surprising football results.

Exploiting the Rare Event: This links to the first example – backing unlikely outcomes (or laying strong favourites) is often profitable. I personally look for odds of 7.0 upwards to analyse for mispricing. At odds of 15.0 upwards in football markets liquidity can be a problem.

Example 3: Confirmation Bias – “I knew Celtic would beat Motherwell”

As humans we look for evidence to support our beliefs while often forgetting to search for indications that we might be wrong. When Celtic scored first against Motherwell at home how many Celtic backers saw this as confirmation that their team was assured of victory (the match ended 1-2 for a “shock” Motherwell win). The effect of this bias is often that favourites already too short on price before the confirming event become even more mispriced in-play. The same effect pushes the unlikely events (draw, away win in this case) into serious value territory.

Exploiting the Bias: After a strong favourite takes the lead check the odds for the draw and opponent win; there will often be opportunities for those willing to lose more often than they win but to win big when the rare event happens.

I use all the above ideas in my football betting and employ an algorithm to identify mispricing, usually finding opportunities to back underdog wins or draws at odds of 7.0 and above. Patience, understanding and commitment are required but the returns can be significant. For those wanting to improve their betting and overall decision making I add my recommendation to read Taleb and Kahneman – they might just change your life as well as your account balance.