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Saturday, December 23, 2006

A Little (Trading) Personality Goes a Long Way

In the course of thinking about my recent trading mistakes, I went back to re-confirm my MBTI personality type. According to the MBTI system, I am a 66% INTP and 33% INFP (which explains why I've always wanted to meet Princess Diana). I score very low on Conscientiousness and high on Introvertism, and Openness. I score marginally higher on pragmatism.

In terms of trading, this has the following implications.
My thoughts, decisions, and actions are oriented towards a perceptive style of approach. This explains why I have difficulty following a hardcoded and structured set of trading rules. So like the WilyTrader, I must commit to being more vigilant at staying organized, and following my set of trading rules.

I seek to understand the world around me through through patterns and seeing the possibilities. This means that recognizing the high probability chart patterns comes natural to me. I am also comfortable with a changing market environment, where one strategy works one day, but another trading strategy should be used in the next day.

I make judgements and conclusions with an attachment to to some subjective like or dislike. This could explain why important trading attributes like Patience and self-discipline are more difficult for me to master.

WilyTrader indicates that the quick thinking, variety seeking, and intuitive yet flexible personality type would be better suited to short, short term trading like daytrading. I've never really thought about it that way before, but now that I have, it seems to make sense to me.

So now that I've gotten yet another dose of self-awareness, I am already cooking up ideas on how to work with my strengths (as opposed to not using them at all), and improve upon my not so strong areas.

2 comments:

Adrian said...

I'm a hard-core INTP and we have some great traits for trading esp tolerance for solitude, abilities to working through mathematics and pattern solving, being flexible and easy-going and having the vision to drive forward. The problems for me at least have come in second-guessing my decisions (which is why I like rules), and following a lot of routine steps (which is why I automate as much as possible).

Some people say you should focus on your deficiencies and become a more well-rounded individual. But if you want to make money, I say screw that. Figure out what you're good at an do more of it. Figure out what you're bad at and do less.

I know what you mean about seeking variety. Let me know if you have any other insights, they'll probably apply very well to me as well!

(Sorry to hear about your futures explosion. You'll bounce back and not make that mistake for a while :) )

Phileo said...

Hi Tyro,

I know what you mean about doing more of what you're good at doing. Trying to "repair" one's own deficiencies is not always the answer, sometimes the answer is looking at how to work around them. Sorta like working on an software defect, right ?