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^"Why were the effects for education and profession so much smaller?"
Because it's not common practice to isolate skill sets in these domains. If you look at what Doug Lemov did author of Teach Like a Champion his group isolates skills that effective teachers commonly use and actually do skills and drills with other teachers to improve their abilities to teach. This is in line with Hanusheks 1992 study that a child with an effective teacher in a so called lower school will do better than a child with a less effective teacher in a really good school.
Jura maybe you should continue to test your theories and research further.
The deliberate practice used in trading provides the perfect foundation to build effective training programs for traders who want to reach consistency faster and have a much higher chance of success.
However, deliberate practice can be difficult because it forces traders out of their comfort zone as the drills get more challenging. So, it’s important to stay resilient as you would in the real financial markets. Deliberate practice also requires long efforts of concentration- perfect for getting you ready once you’re staring at your real, live charts. Lastly, there’s no instant gratification because you need to master many complex skills over time before you see a profitable equity curve.
I have used deliberate practice a lot to improve my trading. I started on and off in 2017, then in 2018 I started to take it seriously but I couldn't get anywhere.
I have a background in engineering but I have been a semi professional musician for 10+ years (classic guitar).
One day a thought came to my mind: what if I can treat trading like music?
A musician learn by deliberate practice, when you first start to play an instrument you don't ask yourself "how long will it take?".
So I made a commitment to only focus on trading every single day.
Three years have passed now, and I have improved so much. You just practice every day and you will become good.
I would imagine here by deliberate practice, one means establishing more mind and body connection, gaining better understanding of yourself and your psychology in critical situations, I think that's pretty much the only secrete sauce of the trading world.
That's probably why it takes long time to master it and even after then you might not be the top most, just like any other field.
Wonder what you mean? What specific actions did you take every single day for 3 years? I would imagine there are plenty of people that trade everyday it are not doing deliberate practice. I’m thinking iof putting together a routine to think about the market every day after hours. Maybe doing a replay everyday and marking up my charts. Curious what you’re doing.
I have traded everyday meaning that I was watching market 8 hours per day for three years, without losing any single day.
Most people watch market from time to time.
I then imposed rules like the systematic use of stop losses etc.... but trading everyday for me is already a form of practice.
When I was playing guitar I used to play every day including Sundays, Saturdays and festivities. This is what musicians do, they practice everyday. And they practice 6+ hours per day.
Deliberate practice always follows the same pattern: break the overall process down into parts, identify your weaknesses, test new strategies for each section, and then integrate your learning into the overall process.
The greatest challenge of deliberate practice is to remain focused. In the beginning, showing up and putting in your reps is the most important thing. But after a while we begin to carelessly overlook small errors and miss daily opportunities for improvement.
This is because the natural tendency of the human brain is to transform repeated behaviors into automatic habits. For example, when you first learned to tie your shoes you had to think carefully about each step of the process. Today, after many repetitions, your brain can perform this sequence automatically. The more we repeat a task the more mindless it becomes.
Mindless activity is the enemy of deliberate practice. The danger of practicing the same thing again and again is that progress becomes assumed. Too often, we assume we are getting better simply because we are gaining experience. In reality, we are merely reinforcing our current habits—not improving them.
This is very true , in trading it's very difficult to understand if you are making any progress. The reason is that P&L is not a good metric, to measure any progress.
What I did in my case was to work on something for some weeks until this something (for instance the systematic use of stops) became innate in my trading.
Then, after one thing became part of my style I started to work on something else.
This is something musicians often do. They work on scales, then on arpeggios etc...
Anyone care to expand on some of their Deliberate Practice Habits? In retrospect, I have unintentionally had months of mindless repetition that I thought was practice, with few insights being discovered and/or and retained.
I'm currently backtesting with the following deliberate practice methods:
Create S.M.A.R.T. weekly goals that are not based around outcomes
Reflect on my session to see where I improved and where I have room for improvement
End of week review to reflect on the week as a whole
Take screenshots of recurring price patterns that may be exploitable
Use spaced repetition software to create flashcards around key themes and/or exploitable price action patterns
One idea that has further reframed my approach to my deliberate practice is the book Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov. The book touches on best practices for practicing and mentioned that there are two types of practices: Drills & Scrimmages...
Drills are honing in on a specific skill. An example of a drill in soccer would be weaving in and out of a series of cones with the ball to improve dribbling. They point out that drills can make you better at a skill, but that doesn't automatically equate to being better overall. In the soccer example, a defender would be seen as incompetent if he chose to dribble the ball repeatedly instead of clearing the ball for example.
This is where scrimmages come into play. Scrimmages are a chance to insert drilled skills into game-like scenarios with a much more focused analysis on whether the skill is resulting in improvement in overall outcomes.
I have spent less time scrimmaging and more time drilling and I feel like my improvements are more noticeable. In retrospect, when I thought I was practicing before, I was actually just replicating my live trading but without risk. It's like playing pickup games... if you aren't paying focused attention on areas that can be tweaked (ie: Drilling) then unchecked (and often bad) habits become ingrained and automated.
In Deliberate Practice, there should be a constant evaluation by the coaching system, along with specific learning targets. The difficulty of each level should gradually increase as the trader's performance improves. The instant feedback by smart drills or a coach would let the traders know right away to do a task and to learn from their mistakes quickly and efficiently.