Praise for Trading from Your Gut

Mastering the Art of the Trade
To become a master trader, to be able to intuitively make good
decisions, you must first gain enough of the right kinds of experi-
ence. This is why doctors and nurses go through extensive training
and supervision when they are new to the profession. It is why fire-
fighters train in fire simulations, and why airline pilots train in flight
simulators. Through this constant exposure and consistent practice,
experts build up a library of experiences that they can draw upon
when making decisions.
To become a master trader, to be able to intuitively
make good decisions, you must first gain enough
of the right kinds of experience.
The same holds true for the trader—the most effective training
is trading itself. In this way, the experiences you encounter while
trading train your intuition so that, in time, you can become an
expert. Learning as a trader can be difficult, however, because of the
price of mistakes. In trading, mistakes cost money. Fortunately,
traders can develop their intuition to a high level of expertise with-
out having to put their money at risk. I discuss several strategies for
doing this in upcoming chapters. 
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1 • T
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OWER OF THE
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From the Library of Daniel Johnson

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Before I lay out these strategies, it is important to understand
the pitfalls and dangers of relying on gut feeling and intuition if you
have not yet received proper training. In the hands of a novice, gut
instinct can be dangerous to your account balance. In the next chap-
ter, “The Purpose of Gut Intuition,” I cover this important topic.
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RADING FROM
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From the Library of Daniel Johnson

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CHAPTER 2
The Purpose of Gut Intuition
“Intuition will tell the thinking mind
where to look next.” 
—Jonas Salk
From the Library of Daniel Johnson
Downloat at WoweBook.Com

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One of my Turtle friends still suffers from partial paralysis after
having been infected with the polio virus as a child in the early
1950s. Polio was the biggest killer of children in those times, and
many who didn’t die were left paralyzed.
The whole world looked to science for a cure. Researchers had
identified the virus in 1908, but for more than four decades, a cure
remained elusive. So it was an important event on April 12, 1955,
when Jonas Salk announced the results of the first clinical trials of a
promising treatment. His polio vaccine was effective and powerful.
Most of the other polio researchers had been working on vac-
cines that used live viruses. They did not believe that a dead virus
could be effective. The trials for these live-virus vaccines had proved
dangerous because they infected the subjects with the very disease
they were trying to inoculate against. Several of the trials resulted in
the deaths and paralysis of children, so the live-virus vaccine proved
not much safer than the polio virus itself.
Why had Jonas Salk decided to buck the trend and use a dead-
virus vaccine when this approach had never been used? It all started
with his intuition—a feeling that something just didn’t make sense.
More than 20 years before his successful vaccine, while Salk was
still in medical school, he had attended two lectures that influenced
him greatly. He still remembered them more than 50 years later.
During the first lecture, he learned about immunizing against diph-
theria or tetanus bacteria using chemically treated or dead versions
of the bacteria. During the second lecture, he learned that humans
had to experience viral infection itself for immunization against a
viral disease. The lecturer said that science could not induce immu-
nity with an inactivated or dead virus. 
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T
RADING FROM
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From the Library of Daniel Johnson

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In his gut, Salk knew something didn’t make sense. If you could
use a dead bacterial toxin to immunize people, he thought, you
ought to be able to use a dead virus to immunize them as well. So 20
years later, when the most prominent researchers were using live
viruses, Salk trusted his earlier gut instinct and continued to work on
a polio vaccine that used a deactivated virus. 
Salk’s intuition paid off. His vaccine worked. A live-virus vaccine
wasn’t deemed safe enough for general use until 1962—seven years
after Salk’s vaccine was approved. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of thou-
sands of people were saved from contracting polio because of Salk’s
intuition.
The best purpose of gut intuition is to keep us from
wasting time on the wrong approach and to keep our
conscious, rational mind focused on what is important.
As noted in the earlier epigram, the best purpose of gut intu-
ition is to keep us from wasting time on the wrong approach and to
keep our conscious, rational mind focused on what is important. If
you learn to listen to your gut, as Salk did, you, too, can find success.
But you need to be careful.