Ao minuto: Petróleo atenua escalada com mercados à espera de resposta do Irão

[Mario-255]

O “swing trading” obriga a uma atenção quase constante, e pode trazer repentes de euforia ou de desespero.

Creio que aqui referias-te ao Day trading. Abr

Certo. Corrigido. Obrigado!

[Royal Orange]

O “swing trading” obriga a uma atenção quase constante, e pode trazer repentes de euforia ou de desespero.

Creio que aqui referias-te ao Day trading. Abr

[Mario-255]

A psicologia do trading é inerente à própria negociação, não é um aspecto acessório que se possa dispensar. Isto é válido mesmo para quem tenha sistemas automáticos, porque, pelo menos, há que tomar as decisões de colocar o sistema em funcionamento e saber quando retirá-lo ou coloca-lo em pausa. Parece-me que muitos traders tentam substituir o auto-conhecimento por conhecimento técnico (AT, AF ou o que seja). Isto parece muito cartesiano, racional, mas é uma fuga. Tal como é uma fuga estudar a psicologia dos mercados sem ter o conhecimento suficiente dos mesmos.

Os académicos podem escrever livros puramente técnicos ou puramente sobre a psicologia dos mercados, mas na realidade do trading as duas coisas estão sempre misturadas (por isso a maior parte das pessoas prefere os livros escritos por quem tenha experiência real, ou seja, que tenha conhecimento de todos os aspectos da área e não seja apenas um excelente técnico ou um bom psicólogo). Alguns exemplos de escolhas que tomamos, mesmo sem percebermos:

1. A escolha da especulação. Existem inúmeras formas de tentar conquistar riqueza, todas sujeitas a algum grau de incerteza, mas o trading lida com a própria incerteza em si. É fácil esquecer isto, talvez porque muitas pessoas entram na “coisa” porque ouviram um amigo falar ou por qualquer razão acidental. Depois, a incerteza logo é transformada noutra coisa pelas diversas formas de análise, e assim cria-se a ilusão de que o mistério não existe, apenas existem dificuldades de “hermenêutica” dos mercados. Contudo, o mistério sempre existirá num sistema de mercado (mesmo se corrompido e manipulado) ou a própria actividade especulativa (tomada no sentido puro e não nas acepções pejorativas veiculadas pela cultura de massas) tornar-se-ia irrelevante.

2. Escolha do veículo de investimento. Ninguém é simplesmente um especulador sem ter uma área específica associada porque existem inúmeros veículos por onde entrar. A escolha daquilo que se vai negociar é a escolha de uma verdadeira relação de conquista, uma relação emocional e, diria mesmo, fetichista. Ninguém negoceia simplesmente no mercado de acções, por exemplo. Negociamos num mercado específico, com acções com um certo perfil e ainda podemos escolher mediante certas características que nunca iremos confessar em público. Um trader profissional não agirá assim, porque o seu trabalho está mais exposto, mas também ele precisa de estabelecer uma relação de confiança e cumplicidade com os seus veículos de investimento. Cada acção, cada metal precioso, cada índice, cada par do forex tem a sua personalidade própria, tem a instabilidade e o fascínio do género feminino , e todos querem defender a sua dama.

3. Escolha do tipo de análise do mercado. São infindáveis, mas não necessariamente irrelevantes, as discussões sobre a melhor forma de analisar os mercados. Porém, a grande maioria dos especuladores decide esta questão derivado a algum tipo de fascínio, de instinto e só depois justifica racionalmente a sua escolha (e acabam frequentemente por se iludir de que fizeram uma escolha puramente racional). O tipo de análise que se usa deriva bastante do nosso tipo de imaginação, do tipo de inteligência que possuímos, da nossa sensibilidade visual, empresarial ou histórica e, claro, do acaso, que nos coloca certas coisas diante de nós antes de outras. O próprio termo “análise” é redutor. Tal como expresso no ponto anterior, entramos em relação emocional com o nosso veículo de investimento e não numa fria relação de análise: o objecto seduz-nos e se fizermos de conta que isso não acontece iremos por maus caminhos. As várias formas de análise são sempre falhas em alguma medida porque não se centram realmente naquilo que podemos fazer com o veículo de investimento, que o tomam como um objecto independente de nós.

4. Escolha temporal do estilo de trading. Esta é outra discussão que parece infindável, porque bons e maus argumentos sucedem-se sem alguém parecer dizer algo realmente convincente. O resultado normal quando as discussões se prolongam sem fim à vista é que as vozes cépticas (que dizem que “tal forma” de trading é um mito) ganham credibilidade. Geralmente, consideram-se 3 “estilos”: “day trading”, “swing trading” (tentar captar os balanços ocorridos de um dia para o outro ou num espaço de poucos dias”, “position trading” (tentar captar as tendências de longa duração). Todas os estilos têm “vencedores” mas a esmagadora maioria dos especuladores perde ou não ganha, qualquer que seja o estilo. Como há tantas razões para não obter sucesso, torna-se difícil dizer algo credível sobre qual o melhor estilo em si mesmo. No entanto, a escolha do estilo é importante porque trás exigências para o trader. O “day trading” obriga a uma atenção quase constante, e pode trazer repentes de euforia ou de desespero. É naturalmente adequado não só a quem tenha muito tempo disponível (ou consiga montar um sistema automático) mas também goste de emoções constantes, sem que nenhuma delas, vistas à distância, tenha algum sentido especial. No outro extremo, o “position trader” é por vezes visto como uma forma de negociação mais madura, que não busca a coisa fácil, mas também está associado a técnicas que exigem já uma boa capitalização de base. No entanto, é uma ilusão achar que é um tipo de trading naturalmente calmo, porque as posições de longo prazo podem acumular grandes lucros ou perdas e isso pode levar a querer alterar os planos iniciais. O “swing trader” é uma espécie de compromisso entre os dois, não precisa de um grande investimento financeiro, emocional e temporal, no entanto também necessita de ter por base um sistema montado e testado. Muitas pessoas chamam de verdadeiro trading a um destes estilos em particular, o que pode não querer dizer mais do que aquele é o estilo que se adapta à sua personalidade.

[FDPC]

Boa noite,

Obrigado Rags, início pela ultima sua consideração que estou de acordo a 100%, são as características de cada um e o momento.
O assunto da psicologia de mercados é interessante e mais convenientemente aplicada a leitura complementar, sem dispersar.
Focar sobre a análise técnica em buscas das tendências, como tão bem elucidou o caldeireiro Cem PT, depois eu vou até lá agradecer
ter oportunidade de ler tão elucidativo texto.
Mas, é isso, o foco na análise técnica, tendências, osciladores e dados.
Concordo plenamente.
A parcela para o "swing" agora é diminuta, o capital principal está em 6 Etfs , sem stress, que vou seguindo a tendência dos índices e faço uma rotação caso haja um indicador menos favorável.
Interrompi essa abordagem quase que instintivamente, por tudo que descreveu.
O entendimento completo das tendências, osciladores, médias móveis, volume, linhas, valores, fibo e gann, levará o tempo
que for necessário e vamos em frente seguindo a tendência.

Obrigado Rags, obrigado a todos
Bons negócios

[Rags]

é sim antes de mais nada reconhecer que esta árdua tarefa de estar dentro dos mercados, do daytrading é altamente estimulante e está dando-me enorme prazer ter entrado nos mercados.

Quatro notas rápidas:

Os estudos apontam para que 90 a 95% dos traderes percam dinheiro em bolsa, e ser daytrader de forma geral (acredito que hajam exceções) é das formas mais dificeis de estar nos mercados e obter sucesso, para além de ser a mais stressante

O livro " Trading in the Zone" é aconselhado para quem já tem conhecimento de análise técnica, não sei se é o teu caso, se sim tudo bem, se não antes de ler este livro será melhor ler um sobre AT. Não quer dizer que não se possa ler antes mas penso que não fará sentido. Pessoalmente, acabei de ler este livro há pouco tempo, levo quatro anos intensos de mercados guio-me por AT e não consigo imaginar melhor altura para o fazer, isto porque não ia conseguir interiorizar e compreender da mesma forma, determinadas explicações.

"Não farei quaisquer recomendações especiais quanto ao sistema ou variáveis que deve usar, porque parto do princípio que a maioria das pessoas que lê este livro já tem algum conhecimento de análise técnica."

Mark Douglas em Trading in the Zone

A ideia de um psicologo é pertinente, acho até, depois de ler o livro, se tivesse que nomear um nome para Mark Douglas chamaria sem dúvida "O Psicologo dos Traderes". Mas isto é porque o homem tem dezenas de anos de mercados e vivências com traderes de todos os géneros. Agora, procurar um psicologo que não faz ideia do que é este mundo, penso que de pouco ou nada servirá.

Em relação ao tema do tópico, e o facto de não ter despertado grande interesse, não me espanta. Também há perto de quatro anos que acompanho o caldeirão (onde muito do pouco que sei aprendi aqui) e temas acerca de confiança, convicções, ambiente mental, desfecho aleatório, pensamento positivo, fluxo de oportunidades, etc etc etc são temas pouco abordados. Talvez por serem temas mais complexos de interiorizar, por abordarem um aspecto mais pessoal, ou porque os traderes (onde eu me incluo) se acupam mais em aprender/debatar AT ou AF...

[FDPC]

estaria sossegado na poupança ou num PPR, essa pequena frase no post acima é significativa, pois aqui a ponderação prevaleceu,
e aquilo que poderia ser apenas uma fuga a crise caso contrário estaria sossegado, já não se análisa assim por que já não é uma fuga a crise
é sim antes de mais nada reconhecer que esta árdua tarefa de estar dentro dos mercados, do daytrading é altamente estimulante e está dando-me enorme prazer ter entrado nos mercados.

Bons negócios!

[FDPC]

Há demasiados textos e literatura pertinente ao tema. Também não há duvida que o processo é lento, mas extremamente dinâmico.

Uma palavra apenas tem o poder de transformar toda uma ideia e pensamento sobre os fatos, quantas vezes durante a vida dizemos a nós mesmos: - mas como é que eu não vi isso? mas agora vejo.

A Análise terapêutica e as consultas em gabinetes de psicologia não se ficam apenas por uma consulta que até poderá durar anos, que é o caso de uma extremamente bem sucedida Senhora Advogada de 52 anos, conhecida de longas datas, desde os 21 anos que faz análise
até hoje, agora em apenas uma sessão semanal, na procura de auto conhecimento.

Precisamos entender os princípios do mercado e a psicologia de mercado e desenvolver o autoconhecimento.
Pretendo, pessoalmente não incorrer a erros como o texto gentilmente publicado pelo DC1989 acima, explica. Bem devido aos meus 54 anos, será pouco provável que isso venha a acontecer, já cumpri diversas etapas de vida, formação, trabalho, casamento, filhos, poupanças e agora mais investimentos não apenas para salvaguardar o patrimônio, mas na medida do possível multiplica-lo, não fora a crise económica , estaria sossegado na poupança ou num PPR.
Quando um indivíduo alcança diversas ambições e realiza objetivos as etapas vão se concluindo e surgirão outras mesmo que um individuo já se sinta em plano de reforma, que é mais uma etapa. Gerir essas diversas etapas da vida é o maior dos desafios.

Neste pequeno texto que está em digestão e reflexão, encontrei material valido para a partilha e referencias bibliográficas importantes, como as que já foram sugeridas. Ainda não comprei o Trading Zone, mas ainda está semana o farei.

Aqui fica: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/epsic/v12n3/a10v12n3.pdf

Obrigado, vamos acumulando mais algum conhecimento e quem sabe também fundamentando sabedoria.

[Blue Epsilon]

Estranhamente, este tópico despertou pouco interesse. Já toda a gente adquiriu domínio de si mesmo?

Muito interessante, acho que ficou tudo a meditar e daí o silêncio...

Curiosamente estou a ler o "Trading in the Zone" e recomendo, assim como os Livros do Jesse Livermore, sobretudo o "Reminiscences of a Stock Trader".

[FDPC]

Um pequeno aparte....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the Love of Money

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

Eight years earlier, I’d walked onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston to begin my summer internship. I already knew I wanted to be rich, but when I started out I had a different idea about what wealth meant. I’d come to Wall Street after reading in the book “Liar’s Poker” how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000 bonus after just two years of work on a trading floor. That seemed like a fortune. Every January and February, I think about that time, because these are the months when bonuses are decided and distributed, when fortunes are made.

I’d learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I make a million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold kitchen cabinets. And not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.

Dad believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so did I. When I walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to be — rich.

IT was a miracle I’d made it to Wall Street at all. While I was competitive and ambitious — a wrestler at Columbia University — I was also a daily drinker and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and ecstasy. I had a propensity for self-destruction that had resulted in my getting suspended from Columbia for burglary, arrested twice and fired from an Internet company for fistfighting. I learned about rage from my dad, too. I can still see his red, contorted face as he charged toward me. I’d lied my way into the C.S.F.B. internship by omitting my transgressions from my résumé and was determined not to blow what seemed a final chance. The only thing as important to me as that internship was my girlfriend, a starter on the Columbia volleyball team. But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I’d sometimes end up with other women.

Three weeks into my internship she wisely dumped me. I don’t like who you’ve become, she said. I couldn’t blame her, but I was so devastated that I couldn’t get out of bed. In desperation, I called a counselor whom I had reluctantly seen a few times before and asked for help.

She helped me see that I was using alcohol and drugs to blunt the powerlessness I felt as a kid and suggested I give them up. That began some of the hardest months of my life. Without the alcohol and drugs in my system, I felt like my chest had been cracked open, exposing my heart to air. The counselor said that my abuse of drugs and alcohol was a symptom of an underlying problem — a “spiritual malady,” she called it. C.S.F.B. didn’t offer me a full-time job, and I returned, distraught, to Columbia for senior year.

After graduation, I got a job at Bank of America, by the grace of a managing director willing to take a chance on a kid who had called him every day for three weeks. With a year of sobriety under my belt, I was sharp, cleareyed and hard-working. At the end of my first year I was thrilled to receive a $40,000 bonus. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to check my balance before I withdrew money. But a week later, a trader who was only four years my senior got hired away by C.S.F.B. for $900,000. After my initial envious shock — his haul was 22 times the size of my bonus — I grew excited at how much money was available.

Over the next few years I worked like a maniac and began to move up the Wall Street ladder. I became a bond and credit default swap trader, one of the more lucrative roles in the business. Just four years after I started at Bank of America, Citibank offered me a “1.75 by 2” which means $1.75 million per year for two years, and I used it to get a promotion. I started dating a pretty blonde and rented a loft apartment on Bond Street for $6,000 a month.

I felt so important. At 25, I could go to any restaurant in Manhattan — Per Se, Le Bernardin — just by picking up the phone and calling one of my brokers, who ingratiate themselves to traders by entertaining with unlimited expense accounts. I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game just by hinting to a broker I might be interested in going. The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.

Still, I was nagged by envy. On a trading desk everyone sits together, from interns to managing directors. When the guy next to you makes $10 million, $1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet. Nonetheless, I was thrilled with my progress.

My counselor didn’t share my elation. She said I might be using money the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol — to make myself feel powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating more and instead focus on healing my inner wound. “Inner wound”? I thought that was going a little far and went to work for a hedge fund.

Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant fireball of greed. I’d think about how my colleagues could buy Micronesia if they wanted to, or become mayor of New York City. They didn’t just have money; they had power — power beyond getting a table at Le Bernardin. Senators came to their offices. They were royalty.

I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid “only” $1.5 million.

But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.

From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

DESPITE my realizations, it was incredibly difficult to leave. I was terrified of running out of money and of forgoing future bonuses. More than anything, I was afraid that five or 10 years down the road, I’d feel like an idiot for walking away from my one chance to be really important. What made it harder was that people thought I was crazy for thinking about leaving. In 2010, in a final paroxysm of my withering addiction, I demanded $8 million instead of $3.6 million. My bosses said they’d raise my bonus if I agreed to stay several more years. Instead, I walked away.

The first year was really hard. I went through what I can only describe as withdrawal — waking up at nights panicked about running out of money, scouring the headlines to see which of my old co-workers had gotten promoted. Over time it got easier — I started to realize that I had enough money, and if I needed to make more, I could. But my wealth addiction still hasn’t gone completely away. Sometimes I still buy lottery tickets.

In the three years since I left, I’ve married, spoken in jails and juvenile detention centers about getting sober, taught a writing class to girls in the foster system, and started a nonprofit called Groceryships to help poor families struggling with obesity and food addiction. I am much happier. I feel as if I’m making a real contribution. And as time passes, the distortion lessens. I see Wall Street’s mantra — “We’re smarter and work harder than everyone else, so we deserve all this money” — for what it is: the rationalization of addicts. From a distance I can see what I couldn’t see then — that Wall Street is a toxic culture that encourages the grandiosity of people who are desperately trying to feel powerful.

I was lucky. My experience with drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction. The years of work I did with my counselor helped me heal the parts of myself that felt damaged and inadequate, so that I had enough of a core sense of self to walk away.

Obrigado DC1989, pelo aparte, lido e em processo de reflexão.

[Mario-255]

Estranhamente, este tópico despertou pouco interesse. Já toda a gente adquiriu domínio de si mesmo?

[DC1989]

Um pequeno aparte....

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the Love of Money

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted.

Eight years earlier, I’d walked onto the trading floor at Credit Suisse First Boston to begin my summer internship. I already knew I wanted to be rich, but when I started out I had a different idea about what wealth meant. I’d come to Wall Street after reading in the book “Liar’s Poker” how Michael Lewis earned a $225,000 bonus after just two years of work on a trading floor. That seemed like a fortune. Every January and February, I think about that time, because these are the months when bonuses are decided and distributed, when fortunes are made.

I’d learned about the importance of being rich from my dad. He was a modern-day Willy Loman, a salesman with huge dreams that never seemed to materialize. “Imagine what life will be like,” he’d say, “when I make a million dollars.” While he dreamed of selling a screenplay, in reality he sold kitchen cabinets. And not that well. We sometimes lived paycheck to paycheck off my mom’s nurse-practitioner salary.

Dad believed money would solve all his problems. At 22, so did I. When I walked onto that trading floor for the first time and saw the glowing flat-screen TVs, high-tech computer monitors and phone turrets with enough dials, knobs and buttons to make it seem like the cockpit of a fighter plane, I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It looked as if the traders were playing a video game inside a spaceship; if you won this video game, you became what I most wanted to be — rich.

IT was a miracle I’d made it to Wall Street at all. While I was competitive and ambitious — a wrestler at Columbia University — I was also a daily drinker and pot smoker and a regular user of cocaine, Ritalin and ecstasy. I had a propensity for self-destruction that had resulted in my getting suspended from Columbia for burglary, arrested twice and fired from an Internet company for fistfighting. I learned about rage from my dad, too. I can still see his red, contorted face as he charged toward me. I’d lied my way into the C.S.F.B. internship by omitting my transgressions from my résumé and was determined not to blow what seemed a final chance. The only thing as important to me as that internship was my girlfriend, a starter on the Columbia volleyball team. But even though I was in love with her, when I got drunk I’d sometimes end up with other women.

Three weeks into my internship she wisely dumped me. I don’t like who you’ve become, she said. I couldn’t blame her, but I was so devastated that I couldn’t get out of bed. In desperation, I called a counselor whom I had reluctantly seen a few times before and asked for help.

She helped me see that I was using alcohol and drugs to blunt the powerlessness I felt as a kid and suggested I give them up. That began some of the hardest months of my life. Without the alcohol and drugs in my system, I felt like my chest had been cracked open, exposing my heart to air. The counselor said that my abuse of drugs and alcohol was a symptom of an underlying problem — a “spiritual malady,” she called it. C.S.F.B. didn’t offer me a full-time job, and I returned, distraught, to Columbia for senior year.

After graduation, I got a job at Bank of America, by the grace of a managing director willing to take a chance on a kid who had called him every day for three weeks. With a year of sobriety under my belt, I was sharp, cleareyed and hard-working. At the end of my first year I was thrilled to receive a $40,000 bonus. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to check my balance before I withdrew money. But a week later, a trader who was only four years my senior got hired away by C.S.F.B. for $900,000. After my initial envious shock — his haul was 22 times the size of my bonus — I grew excited at how much money was available.

Over the next few years I worked like a maniac and began to move up the Wall Street ladder. I became a bond and credit default swap trader, one of the more lucrative roles in the business. Just four years after I started at Bank of America, Citibank offered me a “1.75 by 2” which means $1.75 million per year for two years, and I used it to get a promotion. I started dating a pretty blonde and rented a loft apartment on Bond Street for $6,000 a month.

I felt so important. At 25, I could go to any restaurant in Manhattan — Per Se, Le Bernardin — just by picking up the phone and calling one of my brokers, who ingratiate themselves to traders by entertaining with unlimited expense accounts. I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game just by hinting to a broker I might be interested in going. The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.

Still, I was nagged by envy. On a trading desk everyone sits together, from interns to managing directors. When the guy next to you makes $10 million, $1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet. Nonetheless, I was thrilled with my progress.

My counselor didn’t share my elation. She said I might be using money the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol — to make myself feel powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating more and instead focus on healing my inner wound. “Inner wound”? I thought that was going a little far and went to work for a hedge fund.

Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant fireball of greed. I’d think about how my colleagues could buy Micronesia if they wanted to, or become mayor of New York City. They didn’t just have money; they had power — power beyond getting a table at Le Bernardin. Senators came to their offices. They were royalty.

I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid “only” $1.5 million.

But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.

From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out.

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

DESPITE my realizations, it was incredibly difficult to leave. I was terrified of running out of money and of forgoing future bonuses. More than anything, I was afraid that five or 10 years down the road, I’d feel like an idiot for walking away from my one chance to be really important. What made it harder was that people thought I was crazy for thinking about leaving. In 2010, in a final paroxysm of my withering addiction, I demanded $8 million instead of $3.6 million. My bosses said they’d raise my bonus if I agreed to stay several more years. Instead, I walked away.

The first year was really hard. I went through what I can only describe as withdrawal — waking up at nights panicked about running out of money, scouring the headlines to see which of my old co-workers had gotten promoted. Over time it got easier — I started to realize that I had enough money, and if I needed to make more, I could. But my wealth addiction still hasn’t gone completely away. Sometimes I still buy lottery tickets.

In the three years since I left, I’ve married, spoken in jails and juvenile detention centers about getting sober, taught a writing class to girls in the foster system, and started a nonprofit called Groceryships to help poor families struggling with obesity and food addiction. I am much happier. I feel as if I’m making a real contribution. And as time passes, the distortion lessens. I see Wall Street’s mantra — “We’re smarter and work harder than everyone else, so we deserve all this money” — for what it is: the rationalization of addicts. From a distance I can see what I couldn’t see then — that Wall Street is a toxic culture that encourages the grandiosity of people who are desperately trying to feel powerful.

I was lucky. My experience with drugs and alcohol allowed me to recognize my pursuit of wealth as an addiction. The years of work I did with my counselor helped me heal the parts of myself that felt damaged and inadequate, so that I had enough of a core sense of self to walk away.

[FDPC]

Como uma primeira sugestão de leitura do Caldeireiro Rags está o livro " Trading in the zone".

[FDPC]

A ideia é aprender a tornar-se um observador atento dos seus próprios pensamentos , palavras e actos. A sua primeira linha de defesa contra o erro de trading é dar por si mesmo a pensar sobre ele. É claro que a última linha de defesa é dar por si próprio a agir. Se não se empenhar em tornar-se um observador atento destes processos, as suas tomadas de consciência virão sempre depois da ação normalmente quando já está num profundo estado de arrependimento e frustação.

Mark Douglas

Esta "máxima" gentilmente cedida pelo Caldeireiro Rags, no tópico Cofina, num aparte a psicologia, quando vou até ao índice do fórum, por incrível que me possa parecer, não se encontra. Motivado pelos meus próprios interesses e minhas próprias limitações
abro o tópico, e como estamos num espaço de democracia avançada, os experts, os caldeireiros são base desse desenvolvimento.
O objetivo transcende a motivação pessoal, e minhas variadas limitações não me dão suficiente "élan" (vindo do francês) esse arrebatamento súbito e efêmero no desenvolvimento do tópico.