- 1999: Volume 8, No. 6 The Bored Trader

Making money in the markets, even making a great deal of money from trading, must fit into a life that is filled with other fascinations. Otherwise, a trader who seemingly has everything can end up with nothing. After more than a decade of working with traders as a trader's coach, I have seen men and women who have placed trading, not at the center of their lives, but over the entire picture. The net result has been that, even if they become very successful, their lives can be undone by boredom.

The Trader With No Time On His Hands

Twenty-five years ago, Mike entered trading from a successful career as an engineer. With his savings and profit-sharing proceeds, Mike was well positioned financially to trade. Additionally, he had spent three years in preparation for full-time trading before he made the career move. He had developed a unique mechanical system that he tested and re-tested. Although Mike entered trading when the field of trading psychology was in its infancy, he was fortunate to have been a highly disciplined individual from childhood. He was not greedy, and he did not undermine his efforts with baggage from traumatic events or from an unsupportive home environment. Thus, he did not need coaching or counseling to undo destructive patterns of behavior and thought.

Mike was free to trade and that is what he did, morning, noon, and night. He loved doing research to improve and modify his system and trading. He especially loved the challenges that the market presented. The result was that he made a great deal of money. He loved that, too.

Why did Mike become so absorbed in his trading? Soon after he began trading full time, Mike took a loss that frightened him. He had never felt a significant loss before this trading loss. Up to this point, his life had followed a very predictable path of positive experiences. Although he knew intellectually that trading inevitably involved taking losses, the idea that he could lose everything suddenly occurred to him on a deeply emotional level. He could feel it and see it, and he was frightened by the experience. Mike was determined to make certain that he would never allow himself to suffer a major loss again. Driven by this unconscious fear, Mike focused on his research and system. His problem was that he forgot that there was anything else in life besides trading.

When Mike began trading, he had a wife and three children. As the years passed, his total absorption with trading began to take a toll on his family. Left to raise their children without assistance from her husband, Mike's wife, Emily, began to feel resentment towards him. By the time the children were in high school, Mike barely saw them. They, in turn, had little interest in their father except for the money he made. Once the children were in college, Emily went to graduate school to earn an advanced degree. Afterwards, she left Mike and moved back to her hometown in Indiana.

By this time, Mike had been trading for 15 years. Now, he was better able to concentrate on his trading. For the next few years, Mike traded without the interruptions from wife and children. Trading was the only focus of his life. He rarely spent time with friends; he did not attend church or social clubs, and he had no pets because Mike knew that pets died after a few years and he was not willing to deal with that loss. As time passed, Mike had fewer and fewer exchanges with the outside world. The only thing that mattered to him was his trading. Then, something happened that changed everything.

One day, Mike awoke and walked straight into the trading office that he had built onto his home. He flipped on the lights and felt something that he had never felt before. He felt a lack of desire to spend the entire day in his office. In fact, he almost felt a twinge of revulsion. Instead of getting started, he returned to the kitchen and made himself a breakfast for the first time in many years. The thrill was gone and Mike was bored. Unfortunately, he had no concept of how to handle this situation. Suddenly, he wanted more from his life, but he had no idea what that could be.

As the days passed, Mike found it more difficult to concentrate on his trading. After fifteen years of nearly obsessive trading and research, it was hard to find a new challenge in his trading. Because his trading system was highly refined and predictable in its results, Mike could have hired someone to place his trades for him. But, he had always been afraid to let anyone handle his affairs.

What many traders fail to understand is that the time you spend when you are not trading is actually necessary to support your trading. The joy, health, peace, fulfillment, and growth you gain from these activities are deposited into your life account. The capital maintained in this life account is the other type of capital needed for trading. When you continue to trade without making deposits in your life account, you will eventually come up dry.

Mike decided to take some time off from trading, which was another first for him. In the past 15 years, he had not taken a single long vacation and had only taken a handful of long weekends at the insistence of his wife. Mike was afraid to leave his office for fear that the markets would move and he would lose money or a great opportunity. He called his aging parents and booked a flight to visit them. In the past, the only way they had seen him was when they made the trip from Indiana to visit. Now, they were too old and infirm to travel. The visit with his family was a revelation for Mike. He had no notion of how to relate to his family. With time on his hands, he was even more bored than he was with trading. Sensing his need for something to absorb him, his brother suggested they get on a plane and go to Las Vegas.

In Las Vegas, Mike discovered gambling and many other ways to occupy himself. The fact that he won quite a bit of money was also attractive to him. Mike was not a fool and he knew that gambling was self-destructive. So, he and his brother flew home. When he returned to trading a week later, he approached it differently. Now, he was interested in putting more action in his trading as a prescription for boredom. A year later, Mike had lost nearly all of his trading capital, but at least he was no longer fighting his boredom. He didn't have time. He was now desperate to survive.

How Boredom Creeps In

Many traders are like Mike. They fail to develop any of the other parts of their lives beyond their trading. As a result, their lives do not possess the richness of relationships, social activities, travel, vacationing, or hobbies. Concerned for their security, all of their actions come from a state of fear:

• They don't take vacations for fear of missing something.
• They don't have relationships for fear of being hurt or of being abandoned or giving up some of their money.
• They don't have a pet for fear of it dying.
• They won't eat at expensive restaurants because it's cheaper to eat at home and why should they pay "for a candelabra and linen napkins?"
• They don't join any social groups for fear of being disappointed or criticized.
• They don't have children for fear that they will take drugs or in other ways make their lives miserable.

When traders find themselves trading on "emotional empty," they suddenly lose the passion they once felt for trading. This loss of interest can come very suddenly, as it did for Mike, or it can creep up on a trader like a slowly growing tumor. Regardless of its speed, a trader will reach a point where he has nothing upon which to draw for inspiration, support or escape. Without a life outside of trading, a trader cannot feel interest in trading indefinitely. But, like a Catch 22, without that outside life, there is nowhere to go once he loses interest in trading.

Now, he is bored with his professional as well as his personal life. He keeps asking himself, what is the point? Why have I given everything up to do something so meaningless? Often, there is no one nearby who cares about him to answer, since he has isolated himself in his quest for success.

Not only do traders become bored when they isolate themselves from others; they also become boring. They often find that they have little to talk about with people who are not in their field and they lose the necessary social skills that allow them to interact well through lack of practice. In a downward spiral, this withdrawal from social interaction feeds upon itself, so that these traders rarely find themselves invited to join others.

Getting Into Trouble

One of the major traps that bored traders fall into is that they are likely to lose sight of their goals and their values and the instant fix for boredom is excitement. Once a trader begins to look for excitement, he will do things that are very risky and self-sabotaging. Like Mike, bored traders will find themselves gambling instead of trading, taking risks in order to feel the adrenal pumping. Unfortunately, the pumping sound is usually that of their assets being pumped out of their bank account.

If the risky behavior is not confined to their trading, bored traders may look for excitement in risky sports and risky social behavior, including heavy drinking and drugs. A bored trader may look around for the reason that he is bored and conclude that there is nothing that he has done to cause the problem. He will then look for a culprit and find his wife and children to blame. Without any warning, they will suddenly find themselves replaced by a bright, new, exciting, young creature named Tammy or Tiffany.

The problem is that boredom is not an external problem and cannot be fixed by radical, external changes or by blaming others. It can only be corrected from inside the person who is experiencing it.

Pulling Out Of Boredom

The first steps out of boredom are the very hardest ones. Long entrenched habits make isolated traders fearful, embarrassed, and uncomfortable in taking the first steps to create a life outside of trading. Initially, they may be met with rebuffs, especially from the very people they have ignored or pushed away. They may have to reach out to complete strangers, which can be uncomfortable. One of the easiest ways to take that first step is to join a group that is traditionally welcoming such as a church or a charity that is looking for a helping hand. Getting on the phone is another first step. Making calls to old friends can open up a lost world. Getting on the Internet is another relatively easy step.

It is important for a trader who has reduced the size of his world to figure out what is important to him. Since time is a limited commodity, he should carefully select activities, hobbies, and social experiences that will give him pleasure as well as a sense of fulfillment. He should also attempt to fill out his time roster with physical activities as well as social and spiritual ones to prevent burning out from too limited a focus. An internal journey of discovery is one of the best antidotes to boredom. So is the quest for personal growth.

Once a trader has started to fill his world up outside of trading, he is likely to find that he can return to trading and find pleasure, meaning, and reward in the process.

Conclusion

At some point, traders who limit their activities to trading hit a wall. If they are the lucky ones, they are knocked into consciousness: a person can make money being a trader, but if they don't have a successful life, what is the point? What are you doing with the time when you are not trading? If you do not cultivate that time with the same commitment that you use the time when you are trading, you will have nothing to fall back on when you stop trading. Furthermore, what you do with your non-trading time actually supports your trading. When you don't cultivate the other parts of your life, you will eventually sabotage your trading because you will fail to see the point of it.