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Meditations on Stock Market

Stock Markets and Meditation seem to be the opposite ends of a spectrum. One brings to mind
images of greed, excitement and competition; while other conjures up image of peace,
tranquility and surrender. However meditation can easily help one being more successful in the
stock market.

According to Warren Buffett, the worlds most successful investor; success in market comes
from getting two major things right. Having a sound intellectual framework for investing, and
preventing emotions from corrupting that framework. Meditation can help you in both. Lets
start first with the intellectual framework.

Most people develop an intellectual framework for Finance by reading a lot. They read
formalized MBA curriculums, more structured curriculum by professional Finance organizations
like the CFA Institute and GARP, and they read the thoughts of great and not so great investors,
on being successful in the market. Like any learning, this involved first getting familiar with the
box, deciding what tools in the box and more suitable for you and learning to apply them in a
creative way.

You start getting familiar with the box and the tools in it, using an analytical and logical
approach to learning. With time you realize which of the tools or frameworks are more useful
than others. You start dropping other frameworks, and start using the more effective ones
more often. With time those frameworks become second nature or intuitive to you.

When you have developed a set of frameworks that you can use intuitively, you can glide over
the enormous amount of financial data (available for free on the net) and use your intuition to
identify sound investing opportunities. Logic will never allow you to glean through the massive
sets of data, as fast as an intuitive framework would.

However in the noise and din of modern day finance, sometimes you get stuck in the logical
thought process and do not let your intuitive powers guide you in decision-making. Meditation
is a way of unleashing your intuitive powers. In meditation, a Yogi creates a trance like situation
where he is aware of his body and breath (concentrating on the breath while meditating is a
good idea), detaches himself from his mental and intellectual thoughts, and let his
subconscious intuitive thoughts come out effortlessly.

Normally the subconscious thoughts of a person only come out in a dream. In our conscious
state our ego represses them. But a Yogi, who has mastered the art of meditation, can tap into
his subconscious mind in the meditative trance. Subconscious mind is where the intuitive
frameworks are stored. So if the huh-hub around new earnings announcement and the
impending year-end investor calls are creating too many thoughts; meditation might help you
to let the more intuitive investment frameworks take over. Warning here is that once your
intuition gives you a hypothesis, you should vet it using logic. An enlightened Yogi is one, whose
intuitive subconscious, discerning rational intelligence, mental thoughts and senses all are all
awake.

Thus meditation can help you to invoke your intuition while cogitating over financial data, and
remove clutter and unwanted noise. It can also help you from letting emotions ruin your
decision-making.

Most of the misfortunes in investing happen because people let routine cognitive errors ruin
their thinking. Most of the cognitive biases are created by ego driven mind. You ego prevents
you from seeing the world objectively; rather it wants to twist reality in a way that suits it.
People also project their ego on to their possessions. They may hold on to a stock they invested
in, because they made a decision to buy it at some time; even if their rational mind may say
that the stock is no longer a good investment. Their emotional mind would rather want to hold
on to the loser stock, than admit to the world that it bungled up in the decision-making.

Meditation can help an investor develop a calm sense of rational detachment. Benjamin
Graham, one of the greatest investing writer (perhaps the greatest); called this ataraxia. In the
Hindu holy trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva; it is Shiva who is associated with meditation.
Shiva is the most detached and disengaged of all three mighty gods. He meditates on death and
eternal. This allows him to take a very detached view about the churn of everyday ephemeral
life. This detachment also propels him into swift destructive action; when he feels that the
world is becoming too unworthy a place to exist.

If an investor feels that his emotions may be getting little ahead of him; he should take a
detached Shiva like view of things. He should imagine if little ups and downs of stock market
due to the coming earnings announcement would really matter on his deathbed. This kind of
meditation on the churn of ephemeral and its relevance to eternal; will help the investor make
his decisions with a calm calculus of reason.

(2) Preparing for Meditation

The popular perception about meditation is that it is about stopping your thoughts and
concentrating on a point. However a more befitting description will be that it is about getting
behind your thoughts. There are some techniques that can help you achieve the same.

Lighting a good incense smell in the room helps. While you meditate, your intellectual thoughts
or emotional worries will try and run in your head. To detach yourself from them, you can
simply focus on your breathing. A good smell in the room will help you come back to the smell,
while you are trying to step back from your thoughts.

Although an advanced stage of meditation is where all the visual projections are coming to you
unconsciously (from the sub-conscious mind); certain visualizations can help you in the initial
few minutes of meditation. For example, you can visualize a protective shield around you-which
is blocking the noise of all the ephemeral information, that doesnt seem relevant to your
currently defined purpose. You can visualize yourself as an eagle and look down on your own
daily routine with a god like detachment. You can imagine yourself flying over all the companies
that you are trying to analyze and visualize them presenting their information to you.

You can also visualize yourself sitting in a library or in a cave or any other imagery of your own
personal sanctuary. As you get deeper into your meditation and are able to relax more, the sub-
conscious impressions from all the financial data that you have gleamed over should start
speaking to you. It is not easy for someone who is recently initiated into meditation, to
distinguish between conscious mental projections (either intellect driven thoughts or mind
driven emotions) and unconscious projections, which are coming from the subconscious
thoughts.

The subconscious should be allowed to flow freely guided by your intuition. Let it speak to you.
Sometimes the stream of images, are coming from sub-conscious but after some time your
intellect or mind interferes in them. The acid test is to ask yourself; that are these projections
coming from a ego less consciousness or am I now thinking (or feeling) from my own point of
view, about things that concern me. Indian Yogis advice a technique of saying neti neti
neti;which translates into not this not this not this. Whenever you feel you are meditating
about your conscious thoughts that are coming from your ego consciousness you can tell
yourself not this, this only concerns the selfish me. Let me take the really detached
perspective.