I started trading stocks in January 2000, in March the tech bubble bursted and an almost two years' decline occurred both in the American stock market and obviously in our domestic Milan based stock market. I had no experience at all of how the stock market behaves and I had no idea about who was behind it driving it. But I was prudent and given that I was new to it, I invested very little money. I can remember that I tried continually to get long when the market seemed too stretched down. Did that tactics work ? Never. So I acquired in almost the two year's freefall, a psichologic mind status that the stock market eventually would have been driven down. In other words that free fall had conditioned me for many years to come after. And I thank myself for being prudent so that it didn' t cost me that much. But eventually I learned the lesson : drops in the stock markets do occurr, but they're not the normal thing, they are the exceptional thing, because normally the stock market rises. For sure you don' t want to be long when the stock market is on the verge of a free fall, but you cannot live with the fear of a free fall because you will miss all the long opportunities you encounter along the way. Now I' m happily nor bear, nor bull. I' m experienced enough to know that the best market is the bullish one which occurrs many more months than the bearisn one, but I' m also alerted by the signs preceeding the free fall. In other words I have lost all the mind conditioning that I gained after the 2000 bearish market and at the same way I have kept a prudent attitude towards the stock market. The worst thing however that occurred to me was to let myself be conditioned.....I took time to free myself from it. I think many other people with a bearish bias are still suffering form mind conditioning. As it was for me.......and I underline ''was''
Edited by andr99, 30 April 2021 - 08:45 AM.