Learning to live, learning to trade

Hello my trader friends! Happy New Year to all of you! May this year bring you even more happiness than before and even more prosperity! :)

Over the past months I've been learning to live according to my *experience* of reality, rather than my *thoughts* about it: the experience of different phenomena (sensations, feeling, thoughts) arising and passing inside of Awareness. The phenomena keep changing, but the Awareness stays the same, and as far back as I can remember it was always like this. So I realized that the *real* Master, the real *ME* who is living this life is that Awareness. Interestingly, this awareness has no characteristics and it doesn't know anything about the past or the future. So it turns out that living according to my true nature, living *as* Awareness, implies a totally stress-free life, where all thoughts about potential difficulties in the past or in the future are just experienced as temporary phenomena that have nothing to do with the awareness itself that is observing them, and hence they do not create any negative emotional reactions. I really see no reason to resurrecting the belief that there is some ME separate from the rest of the world lurking in these constantly changing phenomena and starting to stress about how that ME should organize the life around it.

Explaining this idea slightly differently, everyone of us is always being somebody's servant. The vast majority of people are serving constantly changing masters -- thoughts and emotions that arise and pass within the field of awareness. That's why people cannot get lasting happiness -- the master they have pleased yesterday is gone, and a new master demands service and satisfaction every day, sometimes every minute. The alternative is to be the servant of Awareness, whose only motivation is to increase harmony among the phenomena it is whitnessing. It seems a bit strange – why would it have any motivation at all? In fact, initially, when all the phenomena are felt to be independent of the Awareness, no motivation arises. But then, upon a deeper examination, it becomes apparent that Awareness observes not some independent phenomena but only its own manifestations in the form of some phenomena, since if it were possible to separate some phenomena from the Awareness we would then be able to assign some (negative) characteristics to the Awareness. But we can’t do that because only Awareness can exist inside of Awareness, and this realization brings respect and love for all the phenomena experienced, equal to the love one would have for oneself. This is what all religions and mystical traditions have been talking about for thousands of years – ultimately God is everywhere and God is Love. So being a servant of Awareness implies gently applying the force of love to reality, shaping it in the direction of increased harmony. And “learning” how to live according to this new realization means learning not to get tricked into starting to serve some egocentric thoughts/emotions, which sometimes mask themselves very well as being a manifestation of Love for the world.

Using this learning in our family finances, I realized that the biggest mistake I made over the past several years is that I’ve been going long stocks/sectors whose 3-year chart was not in the form of an upward sloping line or a convex cup. This brought a lot of disharmony to our family finances, and it won’t happen again. Having realized this, over the past few months I’ve only been going long stocks that had either one of these two shapes. More specifically, on two separate occasions I bought some June $2.50 BALT calls (at $2.25 and $2.50), and then, when BALT was around $5, I bought some March $5 calls, which I have recently sold because they have doubled in price. Currently, I have sell limit orders for my BALT calls at double their purchase price. If both of those sell limit orders get triggered, I’ll just keep holding my original position in the BALT stock, which I opened at $4.00, until the long-term chart will stop trending up.

Since I still have not paid off my credit card debts, there is no motivation arising inside of Awareness to look for other investments (BALT just happened to be on the radar of Awareness, and so it was natural to buy some calls on it during a pullback).

Also, today Awareness had noticed that EEM dropped to a new 3-month low, and the tops it made over the past 1 year make a nice downward sloping line. This doesn’t fit the definition of a long-term chart in an uptrend, and so I sold today the part of my 401K that I put into LZEMX a few months ago (1/3 of my 401K). My cost basis was $18.40 and judging by EEM’s performance today, LZEMX will close at around $18.00. Better to be out with a minor dent than wait for a turnaround and end up with a complete portfolio destruction, as was the case with my PM sector investments.

Learning to live, learning to trade. :)