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trade or to sell a position, we will be more consumed with positive or negative thoughts and images than when we are totally focused on simply watching the quotes come and go. In this way, even though it is not our intention, watching real-time quotes may be used as an attention-training device, not just as a source of data. Be careful before you think that those who sit around watching quotes for long periods are "wasting" their time. |
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As with anything in life that we get involved in, there are worlds within worlds that begin to surface as you watch quotes changing. And believe me, had I not experienced it myself, I would never have believed such a mundane, passive, and "boring" activity could bring up the welter of thoughts, images, and feelings that it did. Anybody can experience a little anxiety watching if you have money on the line. I'm talking more about all the images and associated thoughts that bubble up when you do it for a while. But the key is to know when to walk away, take a break, and not to get trapped into feeling that you're going to miss something important if you're not sitting there all session long. Don't get strangled by the tape. |
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For those of you who resist watching quotes at all because you can't stand the anxiety of watching your money go up or down from minute to minute, at least experiment with it. It is useful to gain the emotional distance of being able to watch quotes for a while without being emotionally attached, even if you don't do much trading. Of course, it is especially useful for those who are more active online investors to be able to do this. |
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For example, I wrote much of this book with quotes flickering on a screen (a Java applet) behind my writing page. Every few minutes, when I wanted to see what was happening with my stocks, I would simply bring this quote screen forward. If I got too involved in watching a stock moving, I temporarily lost my focus on the writing. Because the market was moving so fast during the last two months of my writing, there were a lot of exciting times with stocks I owned making parabolic moves upward. It made my writing flow more easilywhich would not have been the case had the market been going down in the same fashion. |
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Besides using the quotes as an attention-training device, they are also useful as a simple way to grasp the Buddhist notion of the impermanence of all things. We fight this impermanence with the quotes. We fight it while watching an updating portfolio manager that ticks off the changing value of our stocks. We resist it the same way we do seeing our bodies aging, or anything else in our lives that |
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