“I got them all wrong” exclaimed one private equity portfolio manager. “Ha! Right!” said another Chief Investment Officer when I suggested that the pattern recognition skills embedded in succeeding with the Bloomberg Tradebook Trader Brain Exercise (TBX > GO) resembled private equity decisions. With almost ten thousand players, this exercise/game illustrates an underlying…
UPDATE June 20, 2016: I am SO glad the Cavs won! Thrilled. Elated. Vindicated. Ecstatic. Relieved. Joyous. Shocked... not necessarily in that order. Maybe someday I will get to interview LeBron about the cycle of emotions he experienced and used to create this incredible historic victory! UPDATE June 17, 2016:…
A few weeks ago, I attended the annual meeting of The Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) - a seemingly unlikely place to figure out how to resolve a trading mistake! Those who follow me know I am not only a closet academic but that many of the advanced trading psychology…
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.
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…
Did you know that no one knows for sure how many "basic" (irreducible) emotions there are? Many scientists have long believed in six, a new study indicates four and a growing body of work by the teams emerging from Lisa Feldman Barrett's labs makes a very credible case for only…
