“There’s a time to make money and a time not to lose money.”

Remember, extremes like one created today are often tested again after a relief rally and shorts are squeezed.

DJIA had record intraday swing today, from it's high to it's low it moved 1089 points

remembering

Overall Market Conditions: Extremely Choppy Behavior - Caution is Warranted

Remember, some of the best market bottoms have been formed in late September and early October.

“With better awareness come better choices. And with better choices you’ll see better results. Clarity breeds success.”

Get more sleep and rest.

A large body of evidence suggests that we need at least seven to eight hours of sleep to function optimally, yet more than one-third of us in North America are getting fewer than six hours of sleep each night. What’s more, our culture doesn’t value leisure and rest. Most of us run around like chickens with our heads cut off each day, rushing from one ( trade ) task to the next and rarely taking time to pause, reflect, or decompress.

Here’s the bottom line: if you don’t get enough sleep or rest, you’re not going to (trade) perform at your best or be as healthy as you can be. I know this might sound so obvious it’s not worth saying, but a large percentage of (traders) people simply aren’t sleeping or resting enough. Here are a few tips for addressing this problem:

• Allow at least eight hours for sleep each night
• Create an environment conducive to sleep, no distraction ( TV, laptop, you know it)
• Reduce your exposure to artificial light at night
• Schedule 30 minutes of rest into each day. This could be meditation, a relaxation technique, or simply taking a nap.
• Designate one day a week as a “technology sabbatical”: no email, social media, or web browsing. This can really help you to unwind. 

If you follow these tips for the next few weeks, I’m confident that you’ll see some positive changes in your (trading) performance and health.

What is Deliberate Practice?

Deliberate practice is a highly structured activity engaged in with the specific goal of improving performance.

Deliberate practice is different from work, play and simple repetition of a task. It requires effort, it has no monetary reward, and it is not inherently enjoyable.

When you engage in deliberate practice, improving your performance over time is your goal and motivation.

That’s not to say that deliberate practice can’t be designed to be fun, but it isn’t inherently enjoyable on it’s own.

If you want to gain skills rapidly or approach expert-level status at something, you must understand the importance of deliberate practice and learn how to incorporate it into your daily life.

The Four Essential Components of Deliberate Practice

Research into the history of education (dating back several thousand years), combined with more recent scientific experiments have uncovered a number of conditions for optimal learning and improvement. Again, from K. Anders Ericsson, here are the four essential components of deliberate practice.

When these conditions are met, practice improves accuracy and speed of performance on cognitive, perceptual, and motor tasks:

1. You must be motivated to attend to the task and exert effort to improve your performance.
2. The design of the task should take into account your pre-existing knowledge so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction.
3. You should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of your performance.
4. You should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks.

It’s important to note that without adequate feedback about your performance during practice, efficient learning is impossible and improvement is minimal.

Simple practice isn’t enough to rapidly gain skills.

Mere repetition of an activity won’t lead to improved performance.

Your practice must be: intentional, aimed at improving performance, designed for your current skill level, combined with immediate feedback and repetitious.

What Deliberate Practice Means for You

1. Natural ability is no excuse.
If you’re 5’5″, maybe you shouldn’t set your sites on becoming an NBA center. Some physical limits are obvious. Most other “limits” are cop-outs or relics of old misunderstandings about talent.
What’s cool is that even limits of brainpower can be overcome with deliberate practice. One-on-one tutoring has shown to greatly reduce the differences in achievement between students of different cognitive abilities.
2. How you practice matters most.
To benefit from practice and reach your potential, you have to constantly challenge yourself.
This doesn’t mean repeatedly doing what you already know how to do.
This means understanding your weaknesses and inventing specific tasks in your practice to address those deficiencies.
3. How long you persevere determines your limits.
Becoming an expert is a marathon, not a sprint.
You cannot reach your mental and physical limits in just a few weeks or months. To grow to the top of your game, you’ll have to persevere for years.
Your practice has to be deliberate and intense, but it also has to be carefully scheduled and limited in ways to avoid burnout and long-term fatigue (both mental and physical).
4. Motivation becomes the real constraint on expertise.
Practice isn’t always fun. It’s an investment into improving yourself, your skills and your future.
In order to practice with intention for long enough to become an expert or gain useful skills, you have to find the motivation to make the investment.
Where will you find that motivation? 

The market does what the market does, and that is the simple truth to the matter.

One of the great myths of the stock market is that you have to be in the market all the time in order to be successful. In my view, this is simply not true. There are times when it is appropriate to be heavily invested, and there will be times when the market direction is not so obvious ( like now ). During such an environment, being out of the market and in cash may be the wisest play.

One of the most important things you can do to manage stress is to bring more love, joy and peace into your life.

Obviously there are times when we just can’t avoid stress. Maybe we have a high-stress job like trading, or we’re caring for an ailing parent, or we’re having difficulty with our partner or spouse. In these situations it’s not about reducing stress itself, but about reducing its harmful effects. How do you do that? There are several different strategies: • Reframe the situation. We experience stress because of the meaning we assign to certain events or situations. Sometimes changing our perspective is enough to relieve the stress. For example, being stuck in a losing trade can be a “disaster” or it could be an opportunity for contemplation and learning. • Lower your standards. This is especially important for you perfectionists out there. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Let good enough be good enough. • Practise acceptance. One meditation teacher used to say “All suffering is caused by wishing the moment to be other than it is.” Many things in life are beyond our control. Learn to accept the things you can’t change. • Be grateful. Simply shifting your focus from what is not okay or not enough, to what you’re grateful for or appreciative of can completely change your perspective—and relieve stress. • Cultivate empathy. When you’re in a conflict with another person, make an effort to connect with their feelings and needs. If you understand where they’re coming from, you’ll be less likely to react and take it personally. • Manage your time. Poor time management is a major cause of stress. When you’re overwhelmed with commitments and stretched too thin, it’s difficult to stay present and relaxed. Careful planning and establishing boundaries with your time can help. In addition to everything I’ve listed above, one of the most important things you can do to manage stress is to bring more peace, joy and love into your life. 

Allow all your dreams of doing great work, being creative and making a difference in people's lives to happen today.

 It's fine to have big plans and dreams but wealth is created now. Right now. In this present moment. It was never created at any other time in history. It was always now.
Allow all your dreams of doing great work, being creative and making a difference in people's lives to happen today. Not in some far-off conditional future. Start where you are now.
Noted psychiatrist Stanislav Grof says in The Consciousness Revolution, "I have worked with people who had a major goal in life that required decades of intense and sustained effort to achieve. And when they finally succeeded, they became severely depressed, because they expected something that the achievement of the goal could not give them. Joseph Campbell called this situation, 'getting to the  top of the ladder and finding that it stands against the wrong wall.'"
Don't put off your fulfilment. Don't put your happiness at the top of some ladder you have to climb. Don't wait until you've "made it" to feel great about life. Wealth is attracted to people who feel great right now. People who know how to be and operate in this moment of ever changing NOW.

holding at support or no support, the question is now?

                               30 min. view

There is no rule that say you must be in the market.

"First, do not be invested in the market all the time. There are many times when I have been
completely in cash, especially when I was unsure of the direction of the market and waiting
for a confirmation of the next move." - Jesse Livermore

Remember that in 200 years, it's very likely that nobody alive will know that you ever existed. Most of our daily frustrations and triumphs will amount to nothing in the end. So: Don't spend your whole life doing things that make you feel crappy. Very soon we'll all be dead and none of this will matter. There's nothing simpler than that.