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I've decided to just go ahead and follow Big Mike's guidance about my trading development, starting with a focus on my trading psychology -- and no more live trading.
I've started the Steve Ward course on Trading Psychology mentioned above. At $750, it's about the first money I have spent on trading education.
Dunno if the course will be worth it intrinsically, but the fact that I have an amount of money that I care about invested in it, skin in the game, should focus my mind on the subject sufficiently for me to get something out of it. Intense focus on this subject for about three months should have some impact on my mentality.
First up, we are reading Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow" along with Ward's "High Performance Trading."
My take from reading the Kahneman book to this point is that we all could take Buffett's advice and lose about 30 points of IQ. Being smart can lead to false confidence and reliance on misleading cognitive biases.
I've rarely (maybe twice) recommending paying money to a vendor for trading help. I think both cases where with Gary Dayton (trading psychology).
I would urge extreme caution about spending $750 (or any) for help from vendors. In my experience, well over 90% of them are going to hurt more than help.
The problem people have with Futures is they don't fully understand what they are buying and selling.
One NQ contract is worth approx $70,100 at the current price. You buy or sell it on a $500 day margin. So you have put up $500 (lower with some brokers) good faith deposit on a $70K instrument. Sounds kinda crazy right? You make 10 1 lot trades in a day and you have handled $700k worth of product. (Be honest as traders we are no different from Merchants or Drug dealers, we just buy and sell different products.)
And to be honest it is a contract that is meaningless, its not like you can take delivery of the NQ, and it isn't a stock or share in a company that comes with dividends or voting rights.
For banks it is a hedging tool for retail traders it is pure speculation.
One of my first takeaways from the Steve Ward course came from the recommended reading of Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow."
Cognitive laziness.
Especially with smart people. The smarter we are the more likely we are to elide right over the technical details of complex things like futures and options.
The other day I was talking with a friend who's a retail investor, sophisticated-in-his-own-mind. Well, he knows a lot about finance and PhD level knowledge of JGBs. Always patronizes me, but that's okay.
So we're talking about the fact that the JGB interest payments will reach 56% of revenue for 2014 (!!!) and he explains to me again in his patronizing way how he's hedged against the declining yen via the leveraged ETF YCS.
So, I ask him if he's daytrading or swing-trading YCS. No, he answers smugly, he's just holding it.
Yikes, he's as bad as the pre-futures.io (formerly BMT) me!
Very clever guy, must have read the first three grafs of a Seeking Alpha article and decided this was a savvy buy and hold investment. Dude, you gotta read down to the bottom of the article, then go read the prospectus with a very cynical eye.
How much for a can of peaches at Al Swearengen's saloon?
I did a little digging the other day and came to the conclusion that the flamboyant stock guru with the orange Lamborghini is making over $10M per year off internet marketing.
Discussing this with a friend who's very into internet marketing in another field I was told, "Oh, that's nothing. So-and-so (big famous internet marketing guru) has made 120M."
With respect to my trading mind, I present exhibit "Lumosity."
I've started doing Lumosity. For several reasons, although I'm not drinking the Koolaid, really.
One of the most interesting things about using Lumosity is that it gives you a sort of objective picture of your state of mind at certain times of day and in certain enviroments. In that sense, it's a sort of QS experiment.
That is, I knew that my mind performed differently at different times of day, etc., but I really had not objective demonstration of how dramatic the differences in performance could be, until I started doing Lumosity.
I guess this sort of thing is what hard-core gamers all know as a matter of course.
In short, sometimes I really suck, and other times I am unbelievably sharp and this is clearly reflected in the scores.
Also, sometimes I am very good at a particular kind of game, and suck at others. And vice versa.
Suko, how are you measuring that at different times of day? Are your individual scores on each game so dramatically different that it's just clear as day, or do you just play lumosity at the same time everyday and then alter the time after a week?
I've been doing lumosity just before going to bed and my scores are rubbish compared what people are posting on the lumosity thread. But I know my performance is rubbish in the evening and I don't think I'd ever try to trade then.
The other thing I wanted to say was that this Steve Ward course you're doing can't be bad if one of the first things he does is tell you to read "Thinking, fast and slow". Although I guess I could put together a psychology course and put that in lesson 1 as well, so maybe it's not such a great indicator. I'd be interested to see what solutions come out of it to counter-act cognitive laziness.
You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you.
I do Lumosity at random times, sort of as a killing-time activity. Or like picking at a scab. It's almost like a refuge. I suppose Steve Ward might suggest using Lumosity focusing games as a tip for improving trading performance during the day when a trader gets off his game. Steve emphasizes concrete measures and exercises for getting back on track.
The range in my scores is greater than 50%. I would have thought that performance would be best early in the morning, since I get up at sunrise. But that's not really the case, I feel. I say "feel" because I do not have the actual time and score data, and furthermore the data is skewed by the fact that my kids and wife commandeer the iPad and run up the top scores. I may have to get the family plan and kick them off my iPad.
The fact that I am quibbling over the word "feel" in terms of stats may be a result of reading Kahneman!
I have a friend who says "When you know better, you do better." That may be the first step dealing with these behavioral finance problems. Realizing that you are doing it, and what you are doing.
Here's the reading list for Steve Ward's course, some of these I had never heard of.
High Performance Trading, Steve Ward
Enhancing Trader Performance, Brett Steenbarger
The Hour Between Dog and Wolf, John Coates
Market Mind Games, Denise Shull
Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
Behavioural Investing, James Montier
Stress For Success, James Loehr
The Mindful Workplace, Michael Chaskalson