Teaching You to Trade Stocks 4: What Is Rationality? Buying N-China Shipbuilding This Morning — That's Rationality!

2006/6/19 21:41:14

Strangely enough, in the capital markets, people are constantly preaching to others about being "rational." Yet behind every rational model, without exception, lies a value system serving as its basis, and the attempt to use this so-called basis to defeat the market is itself the greatest psychological basis of all such bases — and this is the foundation of all capital market lies and myths. True rationality is about seeing through all the various rationality lies. Rationality has always been the emperor's new clothes that humans fantasized into existence — this is nothing new at the philosophical level.

Even more laughable is that those poisoned by so-called rationality more frequently turn rationality into a word game. When words become monetized, this word game unfolds in an even more shameless manner. But true rationality has always been in the present moment, has always been about practice — and practice has always been rationality in the present moment. Just as sex is something you do, not something you talk about, rationality is the same.

From the standpoint of the capital markets: all participation is participatable-and-thus-participated-participation. That is, when you participate, the market and you become one — you create the market and the market creates you, and this creation is always in the present moment, and thus also patterned. True rationality doesn't concern itself with the specific mode of participation, but rather how this mode is being "present-momented," and most importantly, how this mode dies.

What is born must eventually die. If nature truly has any law, this is the only law, and the law of the market is the same. So-called laws are fate. In the market, death is the norm and the inevitable, while survival must rely on life as its basis. The so-called "life begets life without ceasing" is actually "death begets death without ceasing." When you become dependent on your basis, you are already in the midst of death. Life and death have always been patterned by the present moment, and the capital market is the same. To think that by leaving life and death behind there is no more life and death — this is merely the delusion of so-called rationality. Anyone in the market is lived-and-died by life and death. Life and death are inescapable, life and death exist between every breath. To be at ease with life and death without departing from it — without this great courage, all rationality is merely the dying wail of the moribund. For the market, to participate is to participate in life and death — navigating freely among various modes with nothing to rely on, giving rise to one's mind with no fixed abode, yet the mind truly has nothing to give rise to — only then can one be at ease amid life and death.

For market participants, the primary and constant imperative is to be clear about the present moment of one's current mode of participation. Yet the vast majority of people in the market don't even know what they're doing — to put it harshly, they die without even knowing how they died. The market is fundamentally composed of such people. This composition has nothing to do with the size of one's capital. Large capital dies even faster — this ID has seen plenty of cases where everything collapsed overnight. Furthermore, if you insist on rationally asking what rationality is in the habitual way, then compared to those so-called rationalists who are all talk and no action — buying N-China Shipbuilding at just over 15 yuan this morning, that's rationality! Rationality is something you do. Today — have you done it?

(To be continued)