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MRI’s of Succesful Traders

I’ve seen this study making the rounds on several websites now as a type of neuroeconomic confirmation of Buffetological principles…

Perhaps procedure might be slightly useful as a means of seeing physical brain improvement by training– such as that found through meditative practices.

“Traders who buy more aggressively based on NAcc signals earn less. High-earning traders have early warning signals in the anterior insular cortex before prices reach a peak, and sell coincidently with that signal, precipitating the crash. These experiments could help understand other cases in which human groups badly miscompute the value of actions or events.”

“Neuroeconomists Confirm Warren Buffet’s Wisdom”:

“Seeing what’s going on in people’s brains when they are trading suggests that Buffett was right on target,” says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech.

That is because in their experimental markets, Camerer and his colleagues found two distinct types of activity in the brains of participants—one that made a small fraction of participants nervous and prompted them to sell their experimental shares even as prices were on the rise, and another that was much more common and made traders behave in a greedy way, buying aggressively during the bubble and even after the peak. The lucky few who received the early warning signal got out of the market early, ultimately causing the bubble to burst, and earned the most money. The others displayed what former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan called “irrational exuberance” and lost their proverbial shirts.

SNIPER LESSONS

One of the trader’s biggest psychological barriers to overcome is over trading. Of course, over trading is relative depending on the type of trader you are and the time frame(s) used to make trading decisions. However, if you have a well formulated trading plan, you will know from past experience when you are walking the line between planned trading and over trading.

Here are some of the symptoms of over trading:

1. not sticking to a plan or system

2. taking trades for no clear reason

3. taking on larger than normal positions

4. second guessing your system

5. jumping the gun (entering a trade in anticipation of an affirmative signal/pattern)

6. obligatory trading (if I am not in a trade, then I am not working)

The underlying cause of over trading is purely a lack of confidence either in yourself and/or your system. If you truly believe that your trading strategy provides X number of high probability set-ups over X number of days, then why would you waste your energy (and capital) taking high risk, low probability trades? The answer: lack of confidence. The solution: think and train like a sniper.

According to the dictionary a sniper is a skilled military shooter detailed to spot and pick off enemy soldiers from a concealed place using long-range small arms. The word originates from the snipe, a game bird difficult for hunters to sneak up on. (more…)

The Ten Cardinal Rules

10rules

1. Learn to function in a tense, unstructured, and unpredictable environment.
2. Be an independent thinker versus a conventional thinker.
3. Work out a way to handle your emotions and maintain objectivity.
4. Don’t rely on hope and fear in the conventional sense.
5. Work continuously to improve yourself, giving importance to self-examination and recognizing that your personality and way of responding to events are a critical part of the game. This requires continuous coaching.
6. Modify your normal responses to certain events.
7. Be willing to face problems, understand them, and recognize that they are in some way related to your behavior.
8. Know when problems can be resolved and then apply methods to solve them. That may mean giving up some control in order to gain a different control. It may mean changes in your personality, learning self-reliance, or giving up independence and ego to become part of a trading team.
9. Understand the larger framework in which trading occurs— how the complexity of the marketplace and your personality both must be taken into account in order to develop the mastery of trading.
10. Develop the right mind-set for trading—a willingness to commit to the kinds of changes in personal habits and beliefs that will drastically alter your life. To do this requires a willingness to surrender to the forces of the game. In order to be able to play at a maximum level, you have to let go of your ego and your need to have things your way.

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