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Reid Hoffman: 16 Lessons Learned

16 Lessons Learned (Among Many!)

-People are complicated and flawed. Root for their better angels.

-The best way to get a busy person’s attention: Help them.

-Keep it simple and move fast when conceiving strategies and making decisions.

-Every weakness has a corresponding strength.

-The values that actually shape a culture have both upside and downside.

-Understand someone’s “alpha” tendencies and how that drives them.

-Self-deception watch: even those who say they don’t need or want flattery, sometimes still need it.

-Be clear on your specific level of engagement on a project.

-Sketch three possible outcomes for a project: the likely upside, likely ‘regular’, and likely downside scenarios.

-A key to making good partnerships great: Identify and emphasize any misaligned incentives.

-Reason is the steering wheel. Emotion is the gas pedal.

-Trade up on trust even if it means you trade down on competency.

-Tell the truth. Don’t reflexively kiss ass to powerful people.

-Respect the shadow power.

-Make people genuine partners and they’ll work harder.

-Final: The people around you change you in myriad unconscious ways

Objectivity in Trading -Anirudh Sethi

Image result for Objectivity in tradingTrading is a very interesting field, and also a highly challenging one. Being faced with changing prices, other traders’ actions, and your expectation and hope of making the right decision, is certainly not an ideal situation to make objective choices. Many a time traders feel the stress and tension of it all to be too heavy on their minds, and as a result, their judgement is clouded. They either act too rashly, or are way too slow and cautious.

So we can all agree that for a trader to be objective is definitely no easy feat. However, an objective mindset is indispensable for a successful trader. The market is going to be offering the trader all kinds of information and data, as well as suggestions and comments being made by fellow traders. A trader needs to learn how to be objective as well as have the flexibility to use that information so as to act upon it objectively. This is however easier said than done.

In reality most traders enter the market with many notions and mindsets, as well as certain biases. The goal is to try to make the best possible trading decision, but due to these aspects it is not always the case. All human beings have an innate tendency of trying to be quite certain about a decision they make, and so they sort of seek confirmation for their actions. However in trading you cannot always be fully certain of your choices, and in the vast majority of the cases you will not be. The best you can do is to acquire information so as to make well informed decisions and as a result minimize risk. Speculating in the financial markets is normal, but no matter how much you try to speculate, you can never be completely certain. (more…)

Mauboussin: Three Steps to Effective Decision Making (Video )

Making an important decision is never easy, but making the right decision is even more challenging. Effective decision-making isn’t just about accumulating information and going with what seems to make the most sense. Sometimes, internal biases can impact the way we seek out and process information, polluting the conclusions we reach in the process. It’s critical to be conscious of those tendencies and to accumulate the sort of fact-based and unbiased inputs that will result in the highest likelihood that a decision actually leads to the desired outcome. In this video, Michael Mauboussin, Credit Suisse’s Head of Financial Strategies, lays out three steps that can help focus a decision-maker’s thinking.

Make the Right Choice: Three Steps to Effective Decision Making 

Most Common Advice is Ineffective

“Plan the trade, and trade the plan!” is perhaps the most common advice given to traders. As far as advice goes, it’s well meaning, but unfortunately falls well short of addressing the problem most traders actually face. 

Looking at the advice, it has two parts. The first part says you need a plan. No argument there. But the second part, about executing the plan, that’s where the problems appear. Why?

The two parts to the advice ‘plan the trade’ and the ‘trade the plan’ require two very different skill sets. Without understanding the different skills required, it’s highly likely that you will continue to regularly veer from your plan.

Here’s the disconnect. Planning the trade depends on your intellect. And most of the time, the development of the plan does not occur in the heat of battle.  It’s relatively easily to let your intellect guide you, to be the primary driver when you’re not in the heat of battle. But in the heat of battle, when we have to decide right now whether to enter or exit, an entirely different situation occurs. (more…)

HOW TO MAKE BETTER DECISIONS

When you have the time make a decision to watch the following program on making better decisions.  You may find that you made the right decision to do so.
FROM THE INTRODUCTION:According to science: We are bad at making decisions. Our decisions are based on oversimplification, laziness and prejudice. And that’s assuming that we haven’t already been hijacked by our surroundings or led astray by our subconscious!
Featuring exclusive footage of experiments that show how our choices can be confounded by temperature, warped by post-rationalisation and even manipulated by the future, Horizon presents a guide to better decision making, and introduces you to Mathematician Garth Sundem, who is convinced that conclusions can best be reached using simple maths and a pencil!

HUMAN MISJUDGMENT- 22 Points

1.  Under-recognition of the power of what psychologists call ‘reinforcement’ and economists call ‘incentives.’

2. Simple psychological denial.

3. Incentive-cause bias, both in one’s own mind and that of ones trusted advisor, where it creates what economists call ‘agency costs.’

4. This is a superpower in error-causing psychological tendency: bias from consistency and commitment tendency, including the tendency to avoid or promptly resolve cognitive dissonance. Includes the self-confirmation tendency of all conclusions, particularly expressed conclusions, and with a special persistence for conclusions that are hard-won.

5. Bias from Pavlovian association, misconstruing past correlation as a reliable basis for decision-making.

6. Bias from reciprocation tendency, including the tendency of one on a roll to act as other persons expect.

7.  Now this is a lollapalooza, and Henry Kaufman wisely talked about this: bias from over-influence by social proof — that is, the conclusions of others, particularly under conditions of natural uncertainty and stress. (more…)

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