Age: 

Every ‘trend’ in price is subject to a lifecycle, birth → death → rebirth.  There are higher order trends, and lower-order trends.  The ages of people in my dreams, in conjunction with the type of interaction with them, often gives temporal and positional clues about price inside of a trend’s respective lifecycle.  For example, as one trend is finishing and the next trend is in its infancy, then dreams will often contain elderly people, and/or infants and toddlers.  Conversely, when price is in the middle, as you would expect, dreams often contain people within the range of middle-age.  Sometimes a person within a single dream will morph into an older or younger person, which can indicate movement of price, for example, a middle-aged lady morphing into a college-aged girl might symbolize price in an up-trend that has gone from overbought to oversold.

Ethnicity/Geography:  

The majority of ethnic differentiation in dreams appears to be linked to the time of day, and geography/relative positions have a correlation with relative locations on the price chart.  The forex and futures markets trade around the clock, and are typically broken into three major time zones, with some natural overlap: Asia– 5pm – 12am PST; Europe– 12am – 8am PST; US– 5am – 1pm PST.  Generally, North/South = up/down, East/West = left/right.

• Indian (Asian/Hindi): This seems to generally pertain to the process of improving the practice of trading as it is part of my life-journey, my individual path through the “Dharma”, i.e. relating to it as part of my spiritual progression.

• Black (African-American): Without any other context, my assumption is a black character will signify a common, average, typical, man-on-the-street (i.e. a lay-person’s) perspective on the market at a particular juncture.  Most of the time, this would probably represent the expectation or belief that price will continue to go in the same direction that it has already moved.  In trading, the ‘public’ perspective is almost always wrong, so this can be quite informative for future direction.

• Mexican: For anyone who has been to Mexico, or frequented many Mexican-run businesses, they would understand the symbolism here of simply a slower pace.  In dreams when I am encountering Mexicans or perhaps in Mexico, that indicates to me price is about to settle down with lower amplitude in its daily ranges, go sideways for many days or weeks, or generally take more time to accomplish a move than I would otherwise expect.

Mom:

My mom had a career as an accountant, and worked in several areas of accounting such as tax preparation, auditing of non-profits, and as a controller/CFO.  She is very astute, strict and demands others are held accountable.  It especially irritates her when things become chaotic, people are out of integrity, or if systems or processes within organizations are rife with redundancy, inefficiency, or nonsensical outcomes stemming from the rules or the structure itself.  She’s also incredibly generous, almost to a fault.  In the context of market mechanics and price movement, I would tend to associate her with an awareness of the market in the manipulation phase, when it behaves counter-intuitively for most, appears to defy expectation, and causes frustration amongst most traders.

Sex:

Whereas skiing is perhaps the most fun clothes-on activity, great quality sex beats nearly everything else in the psychological reward circuit.  Trading has been metaphorically described as trying to make a job of satisfying a psychopathic nymphomaniac with a very bad memory: everyday it’s either show up with your “A-game” or else get killed, with no credit whatsoever for yesterday’s performance.  Most guys claim to be ‘up’ for that challenge but few actually can cut it. Trading is no different.  The vast majority of participants all show up wanting the prize but really have no clue about what they’re doing or how to get it. Many will suffer the consequences of ignorance of both subtle and obvious cues, always trying to impose their oft-irrelevant ‘linear’ routines on the market rather than start from unbiased intimacy, never even seeing the ‘non-linear’ opportunities to respond creatively with playful measured solutions backed by natural conviction. Ego gets you into the game, humility keeps you alive, unconditional love sets you free, i.e. when the focus in a relationship is about the quality of the interaction, depth of intimacy and delivering value with respectful and creative behaviors, it opens the door to all kinds of fruitful interaction.

Sex in dreams and its relation to the market is heavily dependent on context.  Generally, the hotter, more impassioned, more fun, more natural, more done with ease it is, the more likely I will believe the trade opportunity is more substantial.  I’m always sensitive to its placement in a timeline or sequence as a way of mapping the dream information onto the price chart.  

Sister:

She tends to pay up for higher quality when given a choice of options.  You might even say she has ‘expensive taste’ in that she just likes things which are at that premium level.  She’s not wasteful or overindulgent, just naturally tends toward higher-end stuff.  I associate her in dreams with an idea of higher prices.  It might be her in a particular location which could signify the market is already fully-valued, or it could be her in a relatively lower area as a clue that the market will move higher from there.

Skiing/Mountains:

Snow skiing has been, and still is one of my favorite activities in life.  I grew up in southern California, and my parents would take me out of school every year for a week in the middle of winter to the world-class mountain and resort in Sun Valley, Idaho.  I was on the ski team in high school when I lived in Oregon, and I did the ski club in college at UCLA where we would trek to Mammoth several times each winter.  That’s dedication!  I love the cold-and-clear winter weather, the snow-covered mountains, the sensation of high speed, and catching air on big jumps.  Insofar as skiing relates to markets or price action, I relate it mostly to profit-release-phase moves to the downside.  As the adage goes, price goes up the escalator, and down the elevator.  It’s just a lot of fun to capture a significant move where price covers a lot of ground in a relatively short period of time, whoosh!

World Football/Soccer:

I played competitive soccer from Kindergarten through high school, did IM’s in college, and played on a mixed city-league team several years ago.  I follow the English Premier League most closely, and my favorite team is Liverpool.

The parallels between football and the markets/trading are substantial.

• Competition.  Both have a pyramid-like hierarchy.  English football, for example has seven tiers, topped by the “Premier League,” which commands a global following, huge salaries, and most notably– is well-organized and for the most-part is merit-based.  Teams at the top of European football are regarded as the best in the world; they all have extensive and highly specialized support staff, elaborate offices and facilities, and have to care about marketing and brand-management.  From a functional perspective they all do essentially the same things, even though they are in constant competition with one another.  The purpose of the support infrastructure, as the club’s leverageable assets, is to get the highest performance levels from the players and coaches as is possible, because that is the biggest long term driver of success for the entire entity.  The best performances will generate a better winning record, which qualifies the team for higher competitions, which comes with greater financial reward, publicity and notoriety, which attracts higher profile sponsors and quality players, and so on, which increases their chances of future success. Similarly, within the financial universe, the largest banks and investment firms are all in the same general business of skillfully leveraging their assets to turn a profit.  The decisions of the key decision-makers within the firms, in aggregate, determines the prices of every financial instrument on earth.  From the top-down perspective, once the firm determines its strategy, their day-to-day business is market-making and subsequent risk & inventory management.

• Game-Play:  The dimensions of a football pitch are obviously similar to a price chart — up and down, side-to-side.  Two teams pitted against each other– with the goal to move the ball to the opponent’s goal and score.  In the markets it is slightly more dynamic, however, since it is not just the Bulls versus the Bears which would make the up-and-down very transparent, but also there is Professional versus Public.  Because there are higher order, long term trends and lower-order short term trends at play simultaneously, at particular junctures within a trend’s life-cycle, one ‘team’ (financial institution) might be completely inactive for a stretch of time, then suddenly become highly active, and vice versa.  It adds a layer of complexity that goes beyond the scope of general illustration.  Of particular note to me when decoding dream details is the general level of play — sometimes it is just 5-a-side at the park with friends, to rec-league play, all the way to top clubs at the biggest venues in the most pivotal matches– all of which give clues about the significance of a price move.  Does a team score? Does the ball go out of bounds? Is there evidence of great defense or attacking play?  Long-balls or tiki-taka?