Are you wondering, "Are you going to try to make me be mindful if I sign up for your trade alerts?" Definitely not! I enjoy mindfulness and practice it regularly, but it doesn't mean you have to. It's just who I am and it conveys the way I like to approach trading (and life!).
Being mindful means being aware. In particular, it means being aware of your thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations in the present moment.
What does mindfulness have to do with trading? Answer: my portfolio of trading strategies offer potentially big rewards, but they come with risk. There are sure to be drawdowns. If you've lived through a drawdown before, you know it can bring up some intense emotions!
Mindfulness helps me get through those drawdowns with more resilience. It offers a way to practice "watching" my emotions instead of "being" my emotions. It's almost like I'm detached from the emotion, even though I'm feeling the full force of it. It's like I'm not taking it personally; I'm giving space to the emotion and allowing it to be there, simply feeling the raw sensations of the emotion non-judgmentally rather than letting my mind be fueled by the emotion.
Meditation is something that has helped me practice being mindful. It's helped me get better at focusing, since the goal of meditation is to maintain focus as long as possible. It also helped me develop that "watcher" perspective.
What I've learned through meditating is that my mind has its own agenda! It thinks about all sorts of stuff without me "telling it to". It hops around from thinking about what I'm going to eat for dinner to thinking about some random scene from an episode of "Lost" I watched on tv to thinking about something I said to a friend. My mind is all over the place, often without me even conscientiously intending it.
If you take a minute or two and just "watch" your mind, without trying to purposely think of anything, you'll see what I mean. Just close your eyes, with the intention to just watch without doing any thinking, and within a couple minutes or less, you will have had all sorts of thoughts most likely. Understanding how my mind works has helped me "detach" from my mental activity to some degree since I know it's often on auto-pilot.
If I'm in the middle of a drawdown, I try to take the stance of, "I wonder how my mind is going to react to this drawdown, let's find out." And at some point my mind will start pumping out some fear-filled thoughts (like "what if the account blows up" or "what are my friends and family going to think if I lose a bunch of money"). It's almost like there is a fearful or angry "character" in my mind who comes out during drawdowns.
Any time thinking like that starts to happen, I take notice, I drop that mental storyline, and focus my awareness on "being in my body" (on the bodily sensations I'm feeling, whatever they are). It's like I'm accepting that my mind has a tendency to try to protect me and therefore has a lot of fear-filled thoughts, and in that acceptance I'm not fighting the thoughts but instead am just noticing them as if I don't own the thoughts (and they don't own me).
Then I choose what I really want to be focusing on with my time and I do that instead of letting my mind take me down the rabbit hole of anger and fear about the drawdown. I take the posture of being the wisdom behind the thinking so that this fearful character doesn't take me over. It's the focusing that allows me to choose what it really is that I want to be doing.
This watching aspect can have a tremendous impact on my ability to live through the drawdown periods. Ultimately, that might be the hardest part of making a bunch of money with this service: just finding the intestinal fortitude to keep following the alerts even during drawdowns. That's where the mindfulness helps immensely.
PS: If you practice mindfulness enough, then you might find something much more valuable than a bunch of money from this trade alert service. You might find a smattering of inner peace...
If you ever want to ask me questions about mindfulness, or if you want to tell me a mindfulness story of your own, I'd love to hear from you! It's a topic I really enjoy.