Chapter 8 Entry: W - "For your mind to be open to a true exchange of energy, you can't be in a state of knowing or believing that you already know what's going to happen next. When you are at peace with not knowing what's going to happen next, you can interact with the market from a perspective where you will be making yourself available to let the market tell you, from its perspective, what is likely to happen next. At that point, you will be in the best state of mind to spontaneously enter "the zone," where you are tapped into the "now moment opportunity flow." -Mark Douglas A - Mark is giving us the greatest of hope that if we only stop believing and behaving in ways that we know what's going to happen next and we are truly in peace with that notion, we can achieve a state of present mindfulness that will allow us to enter "the zone" where we can tap into the "now moment opportunity flow". A - Even though I am a long way from becoming a consistently profitable trader, our book club has empowered me in ways that I will always be grateful to our leaders Susan and Ed for allowing us to deep dive into "Trading In The Zone" and really absorb the lessons that Mark has to offer. My mindset has been changing in positive ways where I feel much more relaxed and ready as a trader, and the fear and anxiety of losing and trying to "know what's going to happen next" has slowly been dissipating from my life. For me this has been a great benefit in my trading journey. 🙏

Chapter 8 – Working with beliefs W: “They may look (or measure) exactly the same from one occurrence to the next, but the similarities are only on the surface. The undelaying force behind each pattern is traders, and the traders who contribute to the formation of one pattern are always different from the traders who contribute to the next; so the outcome of each pattern is random relative to one another. Our minds have an inherent design characteristic (the association mechanism) that can make this paradox difficult to deal with”. A: we should always expect anything can happen; we need to accept we have not control of what’s coming next. There is no way for us to know what the other traders are thinking and what they are planning to do or what it’s their mental state. We need to be aware other traders’ decisions dictates the outcome of the patterns; traders are constantly making new decisions therefore we can’t assume there is a correlation between patterns, everything is done at that moment. There is no association or consensus among the trader’s decisions; each trader’s decision is independent from each other.

Chapter 8 W- Throughout your trading career you run into many different tactics. Some tactics will work perfectly till they randomly do not work at all. Finding what is wrong is not an easy process whether it’s you or your group reviewing what’s wrong. A- Bad trading practices can be reinforced by a false conformation A- To apply this, you need to try to remove all outside biases from your analyses. This will help in creating the analyses that you have to inevitably write and test. The detail and relevance in your analyses are crucial because it means bad analyses in bad data out. It is important to look at your trades from all angles with a decent sample size.

Chapter 8 - Working with Beliefs W - Our beliefs working in conjunction with the association & pain-avoidance mechanisms act as a force on our 5 senses, causing us to perceive, define, and interpret market info in a way that is consistent with what we expect. What we expect is synonymous with what we believe or assume to be true. Expectations are beliefs projected into some future moment *If info being generated by the market is similar in quality, properties, or characteristics to something that is already in our minds, the two sets of info (outside &i nside) automatically become linked. When the Connection is made, it triggers a state of mind (confidence, euphoria, fear, terror, disappointment, regret, etc). * Our state of mind is always the absolute truth. The problem is how we feel is always the absolute truth, but the beliefs that triggered our state of mind or feeling may or may not be true relative to the possibilities in the market at any given moment. A - Mark is saying our beliefs are the leading indicator. Our minds are constantly trying to connect patterns in every area of our life - to make sense of everything. We do it in the market too - try to connect patterns so they are exactly as they were in prior charts because that makes sense to us. We have to expand our vision/mind to see more...we have to be willing to change our beliefs to do so... A - If we "feel" happy; then we "are" happy. If we "feel" the market is shit today; then the market is shit today. If we feel we are consistently profitable; then I believe we will figure out a way to make it so... it all starts & stops within...people make tons of money & lose tons of money everyday in the market. It is not the market; it is us & it begins with our beliefs from a psychological perspective.