Back in the ‘90s in Chicago when I just beginning to trade my mentor would say: “I’ve seen this movie before.” Mistaking the market for a math problem, I really didn’t get what he meant – until indeed I too felt a click of recognition as I watched price action…
The latest research on preventing the behavioral risks of emotion overload once again turns out to be counter-intuitive. Instead of using your logic to change your feelings, it appears that embracing your emotions may be the fastest route to calming or changing them. "Tapping into more [emphasis mine] emotions improves…
Trading psychology advice permeates the world of traders. Yet, the majority of traders still experience a challenge that goes like this: "Why did I do that?" They have a plan, they swear they will not make that mistake again and BAM! they do precisely the thing they did not want…
Accepting that a whole host of feelings occur in the prospect of exiting a trade helps your ability to act on the intuitive or integral feelings that give you market information.
In the course of my 20+ years in the trading world, the question of when or how to use 'sim' has come up dozens of times. When I traded full-time, I used to wonder. When I added coaching, I got the question all of the time. This week a client…
It unfortunately remains the predominant and conventional wisdom that the best trading occurs from so-called purely rational (read: statistical) and non-emotional analysis. Alas, it's just not true. In fact, it isn't even possible for a human being to make a risk-decision devoid of feelings and the most-forward thinking research says…
Two separate studies interviewing close to 200 successful portfolio managers and traders confirm what Jason Voss and Ravhee Mehta have reported in their books The Intuitive Investor and The Emotionally Intelligent Investor. Being able to read the feelings of other market participants, a form of empathy, and being able to…
In technical terms, the researchers call this projected emotion, "anticipatory affect". In simple terms, the results of this meta-analysis of the brain's reaction to probabilities in risk goes like this: 1. A trader or PM takes in information about the expected mean, variance or skewness of a trade. 2. The…
A coaching client in Hong Kong recently wrote this in response to a homework assignment. It is so good, in my opinion, that I want to make it available. Let us know what you think? FROM: AN You asked me what would be the smallest number of rules I would…
Earlier this week, one of my clients with the title "Head of Equity Trading" wrote exactly this sentence copied and pasted from his email: "i had another one of those traading days where i let my loss just go to its fullest, and had a really bad day." SO... how…
