In a line of work where fortunes are made and lost in a week, a day or even during a single hour, it can be difficult to manage a healthy work-life balance.
Work itself needs balance. Without it, Forex trading can quickly become a wild ride of dizzying highs and crushing lows, a train wreck just waiting to happen. Sometimes, a disaster is only a single, ill-conceived trade away.
For Kenneth Kam, Forex trader extraordinaire, philanthropist, natty dresser and dreamer who plans to set up an investment fund that will one day become the ‘Pension Fund for the World’, trading begins and ends in the mind. The key is to attain mastery of emotion, stop the wild swing of the pendulum between consuming greed and paralysing fear. Everything else flows from it.
It is all about achieving what he calls mindset mastery.
“Mindset mastery is the ability to master emotions, to switch fear, greed, stupidity – and everything else that contributes to the noise – on and off, like you would TV channels,” he says.
Kenneth says emotion is fuelled by the language of the mind, which can impel a trader to make unwise decisions – these can quickly snowball because of the nature of the market.
The mind as a TV.
“Just keep the channels that are useful during the trading moment: a live price feed, technical graph charts, economic trends, news events. Switch off all the other channels!” he says. Without mindset mastery, a trader is at the mercy of his emotions, which can subvert rationality.
The rewards are great… and the pitfalls greater. The markets are as bountiful as they are punishing. “The market has been compared to a manic-depressive in the way it swings between rises and falls,” Kenneth says.
Behind it all is the awesome power of compounding, where the logic of pure arithmetic rules. “In the Forex market, gains… and losses… get amplified by the market trends,” he says. The power of compounding can be a trader’s best friend or greatest enemy.
It is this power of compounding that gives every trader a shot at snowballing his wealth.
That and mindset mastery.
Kenneth maintains that skill and experience only comprise 10 percent of what makes a good trader. Another 10 percent depends on whether you are prepared for opportunities when they arise, which some people – not Kenneth – call luck. The rest, a whopping 80 percent, is owed to mindset mastery.
Kenneth started applying the concept over a year ago.
“I attended a workshop for business executives which demonstrated the importance of mastering your mind and your emotions. It was a revelation,” he says.
The course placed absolute strangers in close proximity, standing facing each other but told to be absolutely quiet. “With no cues at all, some people became angry, some hysterical, a few started crying. I became totally stressed,” he recalls.
Kenneth realised that the language of his own mind was responsible for the emotions. Quickly crystallising these lessons, he found that these insights applied perfectly to Forex trading, where emotions can become toxic because of the immediate and irrevocable consequences of the actions they prompt.
Back at the trading desk, Kenneth began implementing mindset mastery, tweaking it to apply it in the real world of the trader’s staggering stakes. The key, he discovered, lay with mastering the internal conversation, the language the mind was being fed. Mastering it meant being able to switch mental channels on and off.
Today, Kenneth believes mindset mastery is more than a technique. It is the crucible of good trading, and a good life.
Authored by Kenneth Kam
Produced by Callio Media