Taking time off regularly has been one of the most rewarding parts of my professional life. This is especially the case in recent years now that I’ve finally recognized its true value. Besides the obvious fun and relaxing parts about a vacation, it’s more about the results of that experience that I’m most concerned with. A lot of us work very hard and we spend an inexplicable amount of time and energy trying to solve the always evolving puzzle that we call the stock market. It’s easy for us to get lost in the madness. In fact, as humans, we’re built to get lost in it. So it’s important to recognize that this flaw exists within us so we may act accordingly to counter that trait as best we can.
The harder we work the easier it is to get stuck in a specific mindset. The deeper we get involved emotionally, in this case over (too much?) time, the harder it is to visualize the environment from the outside looking in. One of the ways that I try and avoid this common mistake is buy cleaning out all of my charts and starting from scratch to rebuild my entire chartbook. Remember, my book consists of well over 3000 charts in total and I run through these religiously on a weekly basis. Normally I leave my annotations and comments for future review, but once per quarter I wipe them all out completely and start all over again. [Read more…]