Selling: The Emotional Response

What is it that makes us human? One could argue anything really. It could be our ability to adapt as mammals to new situations. It could also be our ability to feel emotions beyond that of the initial origin. The point is that being human comes with many advantages but also with some clear disadvantages. Sometimes however, they can be one and the same.

One of these advantageous disadvantages is our ability to feel emotions on a higher level and to learn from them on an IQ level that is above that of other species on the planet. By having this ability we can think, reason, and make judgement calls based on it to predictably influence our future course or direction. When this is applied to stocks our minds can play tricks on us. Did you know that the human brain can experience pain much stronger than it can experience happiness?

The feeling is a gut response by your sympathetic nervous system that makes sure that if something bad happens in your life, you may be smart enough to avoid it next time. This is a serious advantage when it comes to learning lessons in the stock market. If we make a bad pick, we can learn from that pick and how to avoid it next time (to a certain degree). This however is also a double edged sword, as I motioned to earlier in the article. By having this ability, we can also be tricked by our own minds.