Why Do You Allow Yourself to Be Manipulated?

After recently hitting our 5th anniversary at Elliottwavetrader, and now exceeding 3000 members, I have learned quite a lot about market participants. For example, the one thing that hurts investors the most is when they lie to themselves or allow others to lie to them.
The problem is that there are so many fallacies accepted as gospel in the financial world that it causes investors to continually be looking the wrong way. And, worse yet, ‘analysts’ without any analytical depth (or ethics) fall back upon these fallacies, which allows them to be inappropriately propagated even further throughout the market.
When I was in 5rd grade, my teacher had a sign hanging at the front of the room which said ‘put brain in gear before engaging mouth.’ I would like to slightly modify this sound advice to fit our purposes in the financial markets: ‘put brain in gear before engaging pocketbook.’
Unfortunately, too many investors today do not pay heed to this wise advice. You see, it is just easier to blindly accept what you hear or read in the market rather than actually engage in independent thought. I mean, how many of you actually question the internal logical consistency or even back-test the propositions presented in analysis you read? I will tell you – very few of you. As I said, it is just so much easier to blindly accept what you hear or read if it ‘sounds’ good, especially if it supports your own bias. Yet, what ‘sounds’ good is all too often such superficial analysis that it is rarely accurate and often causes losses.

This post was published at GoldSeek on 26 October 2016.