Praise for Trading from Your Gut

121
From the Library of Daniel Johnson

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ptg
Unnecessary Complication
The great irony of trading is that it is difficult
precisely because it is so very simple.
The great irony of trading is that it is difficult precisely because
it is so very simple.
Our left brain often has a real problem with this concept. It
doesn’t make sense to the logical top-down left brain that it is simple
to make money trading. Our logical mind imagines that if trading
were simple, more traders would be successful; therefore, trading
must be complicated. The left brain measures expertise in terms of
only the type of knowledge that it values: categorizations, classifica-
tions, causal relationships, and temporal correlations—logical
knowledge. The left brain assumes that trading requires a lot of its
type of knowledge. It also assumes that a lot of analytical complica-
tion is required to trade well.
The great irony of trading is that it is difficult
precisely because it is so very simple.
The left brain doesn’t realize that the relative lack of attention to
the right brain’s importance in trading, not the lack of information,
makes trading difficult for most people. The left brain doesn’t put
sufficient value on qualities that are the right brain’s domain: big-
picture perspective, bottom-up thinking, and pattern matching.
These skills are required to become a master trader. 
122
T
RADING FROM
Y
OUR
G
UT
From the Library of Daniel Johnson

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ptg
Most people are missing right-brain instinct and the confidence
to trust that instinct. Hopefully earlier chapters offer a good frame-
work for helping your left brain understand the importance of intu-
ition and the right brain’s bottom-up approach to thinking. Through
proper training, you can build on this framework to help increase
your left brain’s trust in the right brain’s capabilities. Through prac-
tice and habituation, you will soon learn to trust your gut as much as
you trust your head and to trust your unconscious mind as much as
you do your conscious, directed one.
The left brain’s lack of appreciation for the right brain’s big-
picture expertise can be a source of major problems. The left brain
feels a deep conflict when presented with the simple truths of trad-
ing success. It wants tricks and expertise that it can understand. It
wants complication.
This is the reason so many traders seek gurus. Their logical
brains don’t believe that trading can be simple, so they try to seek
out the hidden knowledge that must be missing from their trading.
Lacking this secret information, traders often are hesitant and
unconfident in their trading. The internal conflict between what
their left brain tells them is required and the simple truth that trad-
ing is actually very simple undermines this confidence. So traders
seek out others who can tell them what they think they must be
missing. They believe that if they get the secret information, they
will know enough to trade confidently.
Despite what some people might tell you, no secrets are
involved. The art of the trade comes from simplicity, not complica-
tion, and from seeing the big picture.
C
HAPTER
7 • S
IMPLICITY AND
S
PEED
: T
RAINING TO
B
E A
M
ASTER