Good Investing is a Solitary Practice, Two

Good Investing is a Solitary Practice, Two

Many markets are centered on the physical arenas known as ‘exchanges’; others are established purely through the internet, linking willing buyers and sellers. All however have common characteristics. The first of these, strangely enough, is that it is actually very difficult to identify a physical body of people that constitutes the market ‘crowd’. The investment community is a far larger, far more amorphous and far less tangible construct than the group of people who are physically on the floor of an exchange, or who are actually executing transactions over the net.

Market crowds are primarily a psychological phenomenon rather than a physical one where being part of a crowd puts an individual in possession of sort of a collective mind which is more than the sum of its parts. A crowd has an effective ‘mind’ of its own and each member of that crowd has his behaviour altered by what the crowd thinks and believes. It has its own collective consciousness where the individual’s ability to remain self-aware and think logically, becomes suppressed. Crowds by their very nature only recognize the obvious, driven by their emotional non-rational nature of being part of a herd…as their individual self-awareness fades into the background,  crowd members morph into an expectant state of attention, making them vulnerable to suggestion and manipulation. In short the individual investor becomes part of the crowd’s belief system or if you will, part of the crowd’s dream or thought-form.

It's important to stand apart from the crowd as best you can. One way of doing this would be to develop an awareness of your 'awareness of being.'

awareness...having knowledge of something through observation of how one thinks and feels.
being...........a state of existing

Try to develop your intuition (insight=seeing within). You must try to allow your thinking mind to become aware of your feelings and your other senses. Get in the habit of self-observation. In this way you will be better equipped to think for yourself and not be so easily swept away by the crowd you are part of.

It's important to be aware and have control over how you think because if you don't, there are others in this world that will do it for you.