Learning to Fish

I was born and brought up in a small coastal village of Kerala. It was before the “Gulf Boom” and fishing was the major occupation of the village folk. I was always fascinated by the sea. I enjoyed sitting idle at the seashore watching the waves washing the shores, listening to the whisper of the sea.

I used to watch the fishermen repairing their nets and preparing for the next sail. I was really surprised about their respect for the Ocean. They referred the sea as “Kadalamma” which means the “Mother Ocean”. I could always hear them thank her for a great catch but never heard cursing when they return empty handed. Before leaving the shore, the boat men always prayed to the mother to protect them and bless them with great catch. The first thing they teach their children is to respect Mother Ocean.

Like the Ocean, Market is inviting and notoriously dangerous. As traders, the first thing we should learn is to respect the markets and surrender to her. If we think we can fight and beat the Market, we are totally wrong. Market is supreme and anything happens there is beyond our control.

Unfortunately, most of us do not practice this “Lesson No 1”.We constantly try to fight the market.  We try to go against the market trend. We try to dictate the Market. We expect the market to respect our calculated levels. We are foolish enough to believe that the Market will listen to us and go where we wanted it to go.

There are terra bytes of information available on the internet about trading. Believe me, 99% of these material is all about identifying the right location to initiate a trade. Almost all the studies, let it be MAs, EMAs, Pivots,Fibos,Gann,EW,Trend lines,MP etc, are all used to identify the trade location. Do we really need it? Market itself is always showing us the levels it is going to respect. We do not believe it and arrive at our own levels using complex calculations and expect the market to respect it. Funny

We are not stopping there. We try to dictate the market what it should do at these locations. We label locations as support and resistance. We expect the market to go up from a support and fall from a resistance. Who are we to dictate the market ? Trade locations are nothing but a level at which the market decides its future course of action.

Let us learn to respect the Market and explore the Ocean depths. There are treasure troves waiting to be found.