re: As far as I can tell, no. The predisposition of a person towards optimism or pessimism will always have some influence on their investing decisions.
For many that's true. But the problem is not being optimism or pessimism, it's failure to be a realist. Either you study and prepare yourself for how the market moves through various cycles as the economy or sectors change, or you live through and learn from you mistakes. Right now, many are in the learn from past mistake mode. The market is a constant battle against human nature, it's a flaw in how humans are wired. Some people resign themselves that it's impossible to time buys or sells and develop methods to deal with the problem, such you D & K'rs have done, others can't and trade themselves right out of the market, and still others distill the market down to graphs. As far as me, I use my years of observing how people react to what is happening, from the tender age of 20 in the pits in Chicago watching sweat roll off the traders foreheads, to what is being written on-line. Are posters digging for information, or slapping each other on the back, or fighting, or hanging tail? So I use SI thread tone. LOL, It's true. That and the nightly news, magazines, and newspapers, with FA and TA thrown in, but the tread tone has to be right and is the deciding factor many times.
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