Lion Taming

Clyde Beatty was a famous animal trainer and a Circus owner. He appeared in many films during 1930s to the 1950s and in many television shows until the 1960s. Beatty used a whip and a chair to command the deadly cats. Once he told in an interview that the whip is not that important at all and in reality the chair did the trick.

You might be wondering how one can control an animal as powerful as a Lion with a four legged chair. It is not because the Lion is afraid of the chair. It is that the beast is confused by the chair. Cats are single minded and the points of the chairs four legs bobbing around confuses them. Simply, the chairs legs distract the beast’s attention so that it confuses itself into inactivity.

The animal is biologically programmed to focus on one thing and then attack it. When the tamer holds up a chair the animal loses its thought process and gets distracted as it is confused where to focus. It is basically animal psychology in action. The problem here is a Lion fails to identify a chair as a chair and try to focus on its legs, confusing itself.

As traders, we are also not immune to this psychological phenomenon. Price action trading is purely discretionary and we may need to process a lot of information during the decision making process. We get confused and fail to see the big picture and get distracted by the different individual elements.

Don’t be like the Lion. Learn to see a chair as a chair.