I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Friday Flash, I share an epiphany or aha moment from the past week.
Gnosis: knowledge or insight, usually attained experientially not intellectually. A direct, personal, and inner spiritual awareness of higher truths.
For years now, I’ve been seeking and developing gnosis in trading and investing. I don’t simply want an intellectual understanding of what works (for me) in managing my money. I want to have the experience of it. I want to find a flow in my trading and investing based on that experiential understanding.
In Meditations on the Tarot, an anonymous Tarot commentator writes of The Emperor card:
The less superficial a person is—and the more he knows and is capable of—the greater is his authority. To be something, to know something and to be capable of something is what endows a person with authority. One can also say that a person has authority in proportion to what he unites within himself of the profundity of mysticism, the direct wisdom of gnosis, and the productive power of magic.
I find my trading plan is increasingly uniting with my past experiments in more long-term investing. I lean now towards ETFs (exchange-traded funds) over individual tickers (which I always leaned towards in longer-term investing). I choose a diversified mix of ETFs to trade across factors and sectors (U.S. vs rest of world, large cap vs small cap, growth vs value, commodities vs tech vs health care vs other sectors).
An important aspect of my evolving trading (and investing) is leaving behind the notion that with more analysis of the world economy, of specific equities and sectors, of interest rates, and of technical charts, I can select better investments or tickers to trade. I cannot. What I can do instead is increase the probability that each trade — or longer-term investment — will pay off with profits. This switch for predicting to probability is the most profound change I’ve made to my approach.
It’s a kind of renunciation: a renunciation of the arrogant intellectual idea that I can predict the future. But that idea dies hard. I still feel compelled to act on my convictions sometimes — my conviction, for example, that oil prices are too low given the conflict in the Middle East, or that gold prices must inevitably, eventually go up because of the ongoing debasement of the dollar.
In Tarot for Change, commenting on Anonymous’ Emperor discussion, Jessica Dore writes:
[The] Emperor is not only a figure of power but a renunciant. In other words, the person who embodies true authority must renounce something….
A person who holds true power is one who is able to occupy spaces of intense uncertainty and all the feelings that brings up, while remaining stable in their actions, that is, renouncing one’s need to react in a way that will give them a false sense of control.
Gnosis — knowing something experientially — and remaining stable in one’s actions based on that knowing: this is the basis of successful trading and investing.