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GOAL: TO EXPLORE THE LINKS BETWEEN THE CHARACTERISTICS OF SUCCESSFUL TRADERS AND THE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE MARKET AND BETWEEN SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND PROFITABLE STOCK TRADING
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In this chapter, we make a radical departure from Levels One through Three. We now begin to work with our own underlying structure. If we can align our own underlying structure with that of the market, winning becomes the path of least resistance.

Using our earlier analogy, we identify pianists who reach this level as: those who begin to put a part of themselves into the music. A chord is sustained slightly longer; a crescendo is more gradual and controlled; a tempo is livelier. As listeners, we say these pianists have feeling. We noted earlier how the public forgives Frank Sinatra all his vocal inaccuracies and buys his records because he communicates feeling. The introduction of feeling is one of the important differences between Level Three and Level Four. Feeling is something you don't get at the competent level in trading. Proficient traders feel a connection between themselves and the market; they no longer feel they are "outside" the market. They have become a part of a larger organism that we call the market. Their information, knowledge, and ideas seem to come out of nowhere. Their trading combines an effortless effort with "knowing without knowing how I know."

In this chapter, we will examine:

•  How your body structure affects your trading style;

•  How your brain is wired and is working while you are
trading;

•  Who the three different traders living in your body re-
ally are;

•  How you and the market are alike.

Our study of chaos from economic, sociological, and personal psychological perspectives verifies our assumption that the market is really moved by millions of traders who are just like you and me and who are out there making risky decisions. The market can be thought of as a giant composite of these traders. An analogy might be the "stadium art" created successfully at events such as the Super Bowl and the Olympics, where each seatholder finds a color panel on his or her chair and, on signal, holds it as a contribution to a massive multicolored image. If we can understand ourselves, then we can understand the composite formed by the market. As we will see later in the chapter, the market is really a game of fantasy: sociological fantasy at the market level and psychological fantasy at the individual level.

A primary function of the market is communication—making public, on a real-time basis, what is happening in the pits. The market beams the desires of traders around the world by posting the bid/ask prices and the times of those prices. As individual traders, we communicate (or cogitate) within ourselves while making our trading choices and then we communicate our decisions to the broker and ultimately to the floor.

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