lyzed. Given the speed at which business changes these days, this
trait has to rank as one of its most important assets.
In a contest that’s as hard to win as investing, doesn’t it seem
odd that players would handicap themselves by completely ignor-
ing this potentially extremely valuable resource? Peter Senge at MIT
put it this way in his best-seller, The Fifth Discipline (Currency
Doubleday 1990): “[Leaders] cannot afford to choose between
reason and intuition, or head and heart, any more than they would
choose to walk on one leg or see with one eye.”
Do any modern investors take advantage of this hidden weapon?
Yes. But often we don’t know that they do. For obvious reasons,
professional investors aren’t shouting from the rooftops that they
regularly consult psychics about interest rates and market levels—
and yet they do. When I asked Sonia Choquette, psychic and au-
thor of four books on intuition, about her client base, she told me
that nearly half of her psychic consultations are with businesspeople,
many of them investors. Curious, I asked if the investors sought
specific forecasts about the markets. The response: absolutely.
In our conversation, Sonia stated that the most successful in-
vestors approached it from a long-term perspective. They were in
no hurry to get rich. Like Buffett, they enjoyed the process. In fact,
it was more than just enjoying it; to use Sonia’s words, “they love
it.” They were investing from the heart.
“Hmmm,” I said to Sonia. “Does that mean that these inves-
tors are New Age, sentimental ‘dolphin’ types?”
She laughed, “Not at all. Some of them are S-O-B’s of the first
order! But they truly love investing.”
Sonia went on to explain that these successful investors, many
of them traders, were operating from passion, not fear. That seems
to be the key. Fear—or its derivative, greed (which is actually fear
that there won’t be enough for me)—interferes with the intuitive
process. Investors, therefore, need to check their motives. You don’t
have to start volunteering at soup kitchens, but you do have toOperating on All Cylinders 24726-29 ware 247 1/19/01, 1:20 PM