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Denise Shull: Market mind games (2012, McGraw-Hill) 5 stars

Markets are moved by human emotions what the author calls emotional fractals

5 stars

I finished Market Mind Games and this is what stuck out.

We are emotional beings and are driven by deep emotional patterns (The author calls these emotional fractals) and entire markets are influence by human psychology.

Emotional fractals is a really interesting concept. Basically that our emotional patterns create consistent outcomes. In other words it is the "Why does this always happen to me" syndrome.

How I put this in my own words is that we follow the following process.

Human Beings > Human Feelings > Human Doings > Human Explaining or Rationalizing

The problem comes when we only recognize the action "Human Doings" and then explaining those actions.

Growth happens when you realize your body noticed something (Human Beings), your mind tried to make sense of the body's signal (Human Feelings).

NOTE: The mind isn't always accurate at this stage of the process.

Then in order to alleviated the emotion an action is taken (Human Doing), which may or may not just be repeating bad patterns. The last step is explaining our actions and most of the time we are just making up a story for internal consistency and not the thinking about what our body did and how our mind defined that signal. Growth happens when you analyze the what lead to action and why.