When I woke up on Friday, it was -23° outside - not the wind chill, but the real temperature was -23°.
It was colder Friday at my house in Wisconsin than it was on the North Pole.
About midmorning, my wife told me that there was no water coming from the kitchen faucet.
After some investigation, I determined that there was no water coming from our well into our house. I surmised that either the underground pipe from the well to our house had frozen, our pump had failed or the well had run out of water.
The more I thought about it, the more I felt that getting our water back on was going to be massively expensive and insanely complicated. I wondered who I would call: a plumber, a well-digger?
How could I trust whoever I called?
The bill to have someone come out and fix a frozen well on the coldest day in ten years would be mind-boggling.
By noon, I was convinced that this was going to be a major disaster costing thousands of dollars.
Later that afternoon, I was talking to Bob from Northern Michigan on our regular Friday mentoring meeting. I asked him if he had ever had a problem with a frozen well. His winters are at least as bad as ours and, like us, he lives several miles away from the nearest town.
Bob said that he had never had any problems with his well, but he had read that in Alaska people put electric lights under their cars to keep the engine warm in freezing weather.
We talked about the idea of my shining a light on my well-head outside and I remembered the halogen work lights that I bought for painting and how much heat they put out.
With Bob's help, I devised a plan to array my work lights around my well head and cover it all in a tarp held up by logs from the nearby woodpile.
I built a log fort around the well-head, turned on my work lights and let them shine all night.
By Saturday afternoon, the outside temperature had risen 45° to a spring-like 22°.
My work lights had been shining on the well-head for almost 24 hours. When I reset the circuit breaker, the water came back on.
I was elated.
I had gone from thinking that we wouldn't have water for days, that the cost to fix the well would be in the thousands, and that we would probably be cheated by the workman who came to fix our well to a point where the water was back on at no cost.
All of my fear about the cost and complication of this impossible problem was for naught.
My fear had not led me to a solution. It had prevented me from viewing the problem rationally.
My fear had made me irrational. It had clouded my view of reality.
I had not looked at the problem for what it was.
In reality, even if the worst happened and I had to dig another well in the middle of winter, I would have found someone competent to do the work. I had the money to pay for it and the problem would be solved in a couple of days.
But, those rational, measured thoughts never crossed my mind.
This parallels how fear subtly, but profoundly, effects your trading.
Fear in trading clouds your thinking. It prevents you from fully-capitalizing on good trades.
Fear causes you to stay in losing trades longer than you should. It causes you to alter your plans and set aside your discipline.
Fear makes you think of yourself, not as someone on their way to becoming a great trader, but as an incompetent loser. It makes you feel stupid.
Just like my fear of spending thousands of dollars and being cheated; fear in trading leads you to unhelpful, frustrating and incorrect conclusions.
By identifying your fear and realizing it will sabotage your thinking, you can move away from fear and toward making productive, rational decisions.
Wishing you success in your trading, Jeff Quinto
Copyright 2009 by Jeff Quinto All rights reserved