John Walker, Financial Planner
A question I am often asked is whether you can use your intuition to trade on the share market. Not being expert at the share market, I spoke with John Walker, a financial planner and long-term share market trader.
I met John after he had read an article about my work in a trade magazine often read by chartered accountants and financial planners. John runs a highly successful franchise for a major financial planning group.
John has a quiet manner that exudes confidence and calmness. A scientist by background, John is very aware of his intuition and believes that it can play a role in trading on the share market. I asked John, how does intuition play a role in trading on the share market?
John uses his intuition to trade stocks for his personal portfolio only. John has many years of experience in financial planning advising his clients in sound investment strategies. His intuitive guidance has resulted in successful trading with speculative stocks which traditionally are perceived by many brokers as high risk stocks. John describes his intuition as a ‘little voice’ and a ‘gut feeling’.
I look for my stocks to be topping out or bottoming out and I noticed that over a day or two a topping out can occur and one in particular recently went from $1.70 to $2.25 then back to $2.20 and my gut feel was it is not going to move any further whatever the forces were that had it run up which was expectation of an announcement in the next week."
The little voice said ‘well maybe you should let go of some’.
John ignored his intuition and the stock dropped further. This is one of the many stories that John relates about his intuitive messages that are largely accurate for stock trading.
I did not trust the little voice at all, I guess there is a degree of greed in there. The original stock fell ‘like a stone and I got some out at $1.80, it kept falling at $1.65 and in a couple of days plummeted to $1.37’.
Market forces dictate stock trends yet John’s intuition has acted as an effective early warning system, alerting him to future possibilities. John is equally aware of the need to analyse the market using the available tools at his disposal.
Johns’ intuition of the stock market movements is not without precedent. The billionaire, George Soros named ‘the greatest money manager in the world’ is well known for using intuition not analysis in decision-making in finance with great success. John has practised Transcendental meditation regularly for many years and used many manifestation and visualisation techniques in his business life.
His view of intuition is:
I have a deep-seated belief that it is very powerful to guide you through life in a significantly stress-free manner and my personal frustration around it is that I do not act as if I have confidence in what I have just said.