A Trader’s Pain

作者:Jim Sogi
日期:2013/04/02

Pain is a subject with which traders are probably familiar. There is psychic pain and physical pain. The amount or intensity of both kinds of pain is not commensurate with the amount of the loss in all cases. There is not a direct correlation between the increasing amount of loss and the increase in the amount of pain. For example, the pain of losing 100,000 is not a hundred times the pain of losing $1000, and the pain does not increase in a linear fashion. The pain of losing a loved one is not 1000 times more painful than losing say $100,000. (multiply amounts for wealthy readers). The pain of a small burn can be as painful as a major illness.



The other curious thing about pain is that it ends and its hard to remember after its gone. Experiments have shown that in time people tend to revert to their mean disposition even after horrific personal losses. Some people can handle pain better than others or recover at different speeds. When one is tired, small things can feel more painful. Pain and sadness are closely related to anger. There are mental techniques to handle psychic pain and effective drugs to deaden physical pain. I suppose one could write a book on the subject.