| International Institute of Trading Mastery, Inc | March 3, 2004 — Issue #159 | |
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Feature Article Personality Type and Trading: (Part 4), By Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.
Listening In Swing Trading Discussion
Trading Tips Does an analytically trained professional make a bad trader?
Don’t Step on Your Head, part Two, by D. R. Barton, Jr.
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Personality
Type and Trading: (Part 4) (Activate link here to read previous articles if you missed them.) The Cognitive Modes: Introverted Sensation (IS). IS is the cognitive mode that allows us to be in touch with our bodies. Through IS people are able to sense the rhythms of their bodies. You become aware of how alert you are, how much energy you have, and if any particular part of your body needs attention. For example, the ideal diet for you simply amounts to paying attention to your body. Eat whatever you seem to crave, and then notice what your body's reaction is to that food. If you have reasonable introverted sensation, then you will know your body's response to each food after you've eaten it. Once you know your body's response, then it will teach you exactly what you need to eat to attain the ideal nutrition for your body. Unfortunately, this only works when you have fairly well developed IS. One of the market wizards, when he first attended our Peak Performance 101 Trading course, told me that he was very attuned to stress in his body. He said that whenever it seemed to develop, it always started in his fingertips and then worked its way up his arms and into his body. I suggested that since he was so attuned to the inner sensations of his body, he should simply use the sensations as a signal to back off and relax. Subsequently, he reports that he just does not experience stress any more. This, to me, is IS at its best as utilized by a market wizard. I believe that IS is critical to the trading task of self analysis. If you tend be lax doing self-analysis, then it may be because you have not developed this particular cognitive mode. Please record how comfortable you feel with Introverted Sensation. A rating of one means it seems very strange, you have trouble imagining anyone could do it. Four means you know you do it sometimes, but it is probably just an average skill for you. Seven means it seems very comfortable for you, something you do all the time. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 If you are weak in IS, start some exercises in which you pay attention to your body. Spend half an hour each day, lying down with your eyes closed. Explore your whole body for feelings and notice what is there that you've missed. Also while you are at your computer or observing the market, notice any tensions or unusual feelings you have in your body. Whatever you notice in either exercise, do something about it. If you're tense, stretch it out or practice relaxing or meditating. Extraverted Sensation (ES). People who use a finely developed ES find it easy to note details and discriminate what the environment is. ES processing connects people to the physical aspects of life--the sights, sounds, touches, aromas, and tastes of the physical world. It allows one to appreciate sexual contact, the beauty of a symphony, or the art in a fine painting. People with a highly developed ES typically have good memories, since they record details accurately and have no difficulty remembering them accurately. Everyone uses ES, but there is a big difference between discerning the difference between a red and a green traffic light (a basic survival skill) and noticing subtle shades of differences in a family of colors. People with highly developed ES skills can match the exact shade of red and grey in the couch in a room from memory and come home with a paint color that works perfectly. Those with average skills would probably have to take a swatch of the fabric with them. While some of you may have trouble matching the colors even with the swatch in front of you because "all those reds look the same." ES skills extend to all of the senses. For example, can you identify a wine just by tasting it? Or can you recognize people when they enter the room just by their smell? Or can you recognize someone you haven't been with for years just by hearing their voice? Good ES skills are essential for anyone who must be accurate with details or concrete facts. It is essential for a craftsman or a CPA. ES skills help us keep our feet on the ground and our mind in the present moment. You can probably imagine how important ES skills are for any sort of pattern recognition in the market. If you expect to be able to react to certain market conditions, because you've experienced them before, then you need well-developed ES skills. However, ES skills showed a slight negative correlation to trading success. Once again record how comfortable you feel with this particular mode of interaction. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 To improve your ES skills, you must ground yourself in the present moment. When you are talking with someone, notice all of the specifics of what they say. Practice repeating what they say back to them, repeating as many details as possible. They'll usually be very flattered that you have listened to them so closely. Learn to identify the aromas and tastes of various herbs and spices. Memorize different shades of colors until you can verbalize them on sight. Listen to a band play and pick out how different the music is from instrument to instrument. Or look at daily bar charts, bar by bar until you can recognize every market just by looking at a small sample of bar charts and can say, "Oh, that's a chart of soybeans in April 1997." Next week we will cover Introverted Intuition, both introverted and extroverted modes.
--Van K. Tharp |
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Learn Van Tharp’s Ten-Task model for successful trading and investing. Here is a partial list of the ten tasks in the model that we will help you master:
At the Peak Performance Trading Course, Dr. Tharp will help you install his model so you can trade like other successful traders. You’ll have tools at your disposal that the average investor or trader never even thought about. Advanced
Peak Performance Trading 202 Peak Performance 202, our most significant breakthrough course, is your chance to totally reinvent yourself as a trader/investor. Immense success is possible for most traders and investors. But the secret to that success has little to do with some magical trading system. Instead, it has everything to do with you. You are the secret ingredient to your success. And when you transform yourself, you transform everything. Peak Performance 202 is a major leap forward for those of you who are brave enough to take the plunge.
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Excerpts from Dr. Tharp's Discussion Forum
Swing Trading |
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Peak Performance Trading Tips Tip# 108 Don't
Step on Your Head - Part Two
1 : The act of over-analyzing a trading situation, resulting in either a.) paralysis by analysis, or bJ an unquenchable belief in the rightness or truth of one’s trading actions. 2 : Any trading activity where your smarts get in the way of good ol’ fashioned common sense. Does a good engineer, doctor, accountant, computer programmer or other analytically trained professional make a bad trader? As with most complex questions, a good answer is, “It depends.” On the one hand, folks that have this type of background are usually very quick to grasp the concepts of technical analysis and can be very controlled practitioners of systematic trading. On the other hand, those of us who have had years of education and practical experience in fields that reward exactness, attention to detail and “being right” have real barriers to overcome as traders. Analytically trained professionals tend to have the most problem accepting that sometimes our models don’t work. Sometimes the markets just don’t make sense. And lots of times we’re just plain wrong about the markets! When it turns out they’ve made an incorrect prognostication in the markets, most new traders (especially the technically trained ones) tend to add complexity in order to understand where they went wrong. Extra indicators. More filters. Optimization. It’s time to apply years of training and practice in fields that specialize in problem solving to this special problem called the markets. But instead of “solving the problem”, we step on our heads. Here’s the tough part: sometimes we can’t solve the problem. In many areas of life, (trading and investing being the one we’re focused on here) there is too much uncertainty or variability involved to definitively solve the problem. Sometimes the best we can do is to find an edge
and take advantage of it. Now, before all of tech buddies freak out, that edge can usually be quantified and put into statistical language. (Whew. For a minute there it looked like this was going to be about psychology and learning “the rhythm of the markets” and all that soft stuff…) So our challenge for this week is to spend a little less time stepping on our heads (overanalyzing) while looking at the markets and more time figuring out what we don’t know and what may be unknowable. Here’s a place to start: why did the Euro tank 150 pips in about 20 minutes, starting at 10:30 EST on 03/02? I read several interesting fundamental explanations, some of which didn’t agree or contradicted themselves. There are also conflicting technical answers. Stretch yourself to think with your whole brain, not just the logical / linear left half. And have fun with it! Who knows, maybe we’ll all spend less time on our cabezas and more time seeing those exploitable edges. D.
R. Barton, Jr. is a lead instructor for IITM courses. He will be
presenting at the Trading Mastery course, Swing Trading and Day
Trading courses, all in June 2004. He is the
Chief Operating Officer and Risk Manager for the Directional
Research and Trading hedge fund group. D. R. has been actively
involved in trading, researching and teaching in the markets since
1986. In 1999. D. R. has created extensive and innovative new
training products and taught extensively in many investment areas
including intra-day trading, swing trading, and cutting edge risk
management techniques. |
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Quote of the Week: ""Let us become the change we seek in this world." |
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2004
Schedule is now on line! Peak Performance 101 and 202, March 2004 Raleigh, NC |
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