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The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success-Dutton & McNab :Book Review

the goodAccording to a controversial 2011 study by researchers at the University of St. Gallen, traders are more reckless and more manipulative than psychopaths. The traders in the study were intent on getting more than their opponents; in fact, “they spent a lot of energy trying to damage their opponents.” They behaved as though their neighbor had the same car, “and they took after it with a baseball bat so they could look better themselves.”

I suppose Kevin Dutton and Andy McNab would characterize these traders as bad psychopaths. They possess some character traits that could propel them to great profits, but if left unchecked these traits may lead to financial implosion instead.

The Good Psychopath’s Guide to Success: How to use your inner psychopath to get the most out of life (Apostrophe Books, 2014) is co-authored by a (good) psychopath and a psychologist. McNab is an SAS (British Special Air Service) legend who, as he himself claims, is “considered to be one of the top thirty writers of all time”—I assume by someone whose education was tragically cut short. Dutton, a research fellow at Oxford, has spent a lifetime studying psychopaths. The book, reflecting the penchants of the authors, illustrates self-help principles with rough and tumble adventure tales.

A psychopath has a distinct subset of personality characteristics, including ruthlessness, fearlessness, impulsivity, self-confidence, focus, coolness under pressure, mental toughness, charm, charisma, reduced empathy, and a lack of conscience. Depending on how these traits are dialed up, down, or omitted, the psychopath can be either good or bad.

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Two Types of Intuition

I distinguish two types of intuition – inherent and acquired. Inherent is the one you were born with and it is the end product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolution aka trying to survive in the fields. We are wired to seek instant gratification without a deeper thought about the future consequences, we are loss averse and stubborn.

While the inherent (core) intuition is the pre-installed software, each and everyone of us is born with, the acquired intuition is the upgrade we get through life as it is based on everything we experienced. Your brain remembers everything, even if you don’t realize it. Of course you can easily recall only the most vivid memories as depending on your everyday activity the brain has prioritized what is important and what is not.

When it comes to trading or investing, there is a reason you like some patterns more than others. The question is, should you trust your intuition? The contrarian school of thought in the market teaches that you should try to fade your intuition as it usually points you in the wrong direction. This is not always the case. If you have enough experience, your intuition is your biggest edge as it recognizes combinations of patterns and factors invisible for the normal eye. (more…)

Trading Mindset Upgrade Profit Opportunity -Anirudh Sethi

Image result for Trading MindsetAnybody that has traded for an expanded timeframe comprehends the significance of having the correct attitude with regards to trading beneficially. Truth be told, without the correct attitude, it’s practically difficult to deliver reliable outcomes. In addition, the greatest test I’ve seen for some traders understands what the right mentality involves, and after that making it perpetual so it turns out to be second nature while connecting with the business sectors. Most traders concentrate on creating techniques with a specific end goal to profit. Henceforth, there is no other path around. In any case, your mentality is regularly “the missing connection” with a specific end goal to perform better. To get consistent returns you need to concentrate on the mental part the same amount of as the trading numbers. For the individuals who have not traded much, this may sound somewhat abnormal. What does brain science need to do with hard and cool trading numbers? In the wake of trading for a few years, you’ll find that trading is absolutely not as simple as it appears to be, an incredible inverse. On the off chance that you can’t take after the principles of the procedure, you essentially have no technique.

Target is Most Valuable Consequence of Trading Mindset

Your mindset and convictions will be a noteworthy deciding component in your trading come about. Consider this illustration, where the same fruitful trading approach is utilized by a hundred traders and ordinarily no two of them will trade it the very same way. Why? Since every trader has a one of a kind conviction framework, and their convictions will decide their trading style and their trading comes about. That is the reason even with a gainful and demonstrated trading approach; numerous traders will come up short. They don’t have the best possible conviction framework to empower them to trade well. At the end of the day, they do not have ‘The Trader’s Mindset’. When you experience mental issues it is best to perceive the issues, simply know about them and don’t deny they exist. Keeping in mind the end goal to settle mental issues, we should first wind up plainly mindful of the issues that are making the issues altogether mind. This is a lot of what truly matters to analysis. The therapist or psychotherapist tries to get the patient initially to perceive issues that are causing their issues. The patient must trust that these issues are making the issue altogether for the patient recuperates. The reason this procedure can take so long, maybe even years, is on the grounds that the patient needs to perceive their issues as well as must acknowledge that there genuinely is an issue. They should assume liability for their issues to recuperate. (more…)

Simple Things For Creating A Great Trade

Research is showing how powerful our mental context is in making risk decisions. But the thing is, most traders think mental context is about what they know – their insights, their indicators and their experience. In reality, it goes much further and deeper than that.

Recent experience that seems totally unrelated to trading counts. For example, if you work on a desk, then the adminis-trivia and in particular, its effect on your attitude will influence your trading. If your boss or colleague seemed to criticize – or compliment – you, it will influence your trading.

College students have been shown to walk slower after hearing the words gray hair, glasses, knee replacement. Interviewers have shown they can feel differently about a candidate depending on the temperature of the coffee cup they just held. Our unconscious sensory and information machine is working all of the time. It pays to make it an asset and not a liability. (more…)

Intuition & Vision in Trading

 Intuition – A qualitative virtue recognized by few and held by even less. Our intuition is the byproduct of the analysis performed by our subconscious. It acts much like a muscle and requires exercise to develop and grow. Like a muscle, neglect can cause atrophy. Traders with a strong intuition built on a strong trading strategy put themselves in an ideal position to achieve consistent success in the market. Over time, traders can feel the energy a market gives off and can execute trades from this. It is an invaluable tool in one’s trading arsenal.

Vision – While total clairvoyance as to future price movement is unrealistic. It is my goal as a trader to assimilate as much information as possible with the goal of playing out scenarios that tie in together. It’s not always easy to do, yet understanding trading does not occur in a vacuum and markets do exhibit funny things get you mentally prepared to deal with these outlier events. Those that can think for themselves and need not rely on templatized news releases for their ideas usually put themselves in a position to benefit from their forward thinking.

We have heard many times about leaders who saw an industry trend before it happened. This was no accident. It came as a result of their understanding of their field and what could change it for the better. Traders who gain an understanding of how things can potentially play out and factor that into their trading strategy go a long way to keeping their objectivity when things unfold in a fast and volatile market.

Apollo Robbins: The art of misdirection (Mind Blowing Video )

Pickpocketing is a triumph of craft: a distracting touch with one hand, while the other hand gets to work, and the next thing you know … where’s my wallet? Apollo Robbins is a modern master of picking pockets, possessor of a subtle understanding of human attention, a taste for classic crime, and something he calls “grift sense” — which, as he told the New Yorker , is “stepping outside yourself and seeing through the other person’s eyes, thinking through the other person’s mind, but it’s happening on a subconscious level.”
 
Robbins makes a living as an entertainer, speaker and television personality, and he also is the founder of Whizmob Inc., a collective of misdirection experts — including reformed criminals — that schools military and law enforcement leaders in fraud and scam tactics. Robbins has also collaborated with academics in his quest to understand how awareness and attention can be manipulated. He’s co-author of a 2011 paper that explores something he noticed in his countless hours of practice: people’s eyes are more easily misdirected to follow a curve than a straight line. (more…)

Dr.Elizabeth Lombardo, Better Than Perfect-Book REVIEW

BETTER THAN PERFECTPerfectionism as it is usually understood can be a terrible curse, especially for a trader. It leads a person to act out of fear rather than passion—and sometimes not to act at all (why bother? I’ll botch it anyway). The perfectionist has both an “incessant drive to control the future” and “the unsatisfying feeling that, no matter how hard [he tries, he] will always come up short.” (p. 7)

In Better Than Perfect: 7 Strategies to Crush Your Inner Critic and Create a Life You Love (Seal Press, forthcoming September 23) Elizabeth Lombardo, a clinical psychologist and author of the national bestseller A Happy You, tackles the problems perfectionists create for themselves and suggests ways to overcome them.

For the most part Lombardo’s solutions involve reframing attitudes and motivations. Take the fear/passion dichotomy. “When you are fueled by fear, you focus on what you don’t want. Your goal is to do everything in your power to reduce the possibility of an undesired outcome. … Just by switching your perspective from one of fear to one of passion—working toward a desired outcome instead of avoiding an unwanted result—you can begin to feel more motivated, engaged, positive, and hopeful.” (p. 50)

Perfectionists are inclined to compare themselves to others and to judge themselves negatively. Of course, it’s not only perfectionists who do this; they are simply more intensely competitive. As Lombardo says, “Perfectionists don’t just want to ‘keep up with the Joneses,’ they want to kick the Joneses’ butts!” (p. 185) Well, that sounds more like trader talk; maybe a dose of perfectionism is actually a good thing, at least professionally. Lombardo admits that “many champion athletes, prominent scientists, and celebrities demonstrate perfectionist traits.” (p. 6)

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5 Basic Tasks Necessary To Become A Winning Trader

  1. Develop a competent analytical methodology.
  2. Extract a reasonable trading plan from this methodology.
  3. Formulate rules for this plan that incorporate money management techniques.
  4. Back-test the plan over a sufficiently long period.
  5. Exercise self-management so that you adhere to the plan. The best plan in the world cannot work if you don’t act on it.

6 Rules of Michael Steinhardt

1. Make all your mistakes early in life: The more tough lessons you learn early on, the fewer (bigger) errors you make later. A common mistake of all young investors is to be too trusting with brokers, analysts, and newsletters who are trying to sell you something.

2. Always make your living doing something you enjoy: Devote your full intensity for success over the long-term.

3. Be intellectually competitive: Do constant research on subjects that make you money. Plow through the data so as to be able to sense a major change coming in the macro situation.

4. Make good decisions even with incomplete information: Investors never have all the data they need before they put their money at risk. Investing is all about decision-making with imperfect information. You will never have all the info you need. What matters is what you do with the information you have. Do your homework and focus on the facts that matter most in any investing situation.

5. Always trust your intuition: Intuition is more than just a hunch — it resembles a hidden supercomputer in the mind that you’re not even aware is there. It can help you do the right thing at the right time if you give it a chance. Over time, your own trading experience will help develop your intuition so that major pitfalls can be avoided.

6. Don’t make small investments: You only have so much time and energy so when you put your money in play. So, if you’re going to put money at risk, make sure the reward is high enough to justify it.

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