My guest today is Jason Williams, M.D., a highly trained psychiatrist and the son of legendary trader Larry Williams, explains how to assess and measure your innate personality traits and align them with your trading style for more profitable trading on a more consistent basis.
The topic is his book The Mental Edge in Trading : Adapt Your Personality Traits and Control Your Emotions to Make Smarter Investments.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Using your personality to your advantage
Psychology of trading
What is the NEO PI-R test?
Why anxiety is important in trading
Commonalities among traders
“The markets are very complex in understanding that nobody really understands how and why the markets move all the time.” – Dr. Jason Williams
Charles Faulkner has been featured in many Trend Following Radio episodes and across all of my books. An excerpt from “The Little Book of Trading”:
Perhaps you have heard the expression about living in the moment of now. What do I mean? The past is gone and the future is unknowable, but we have right now. That does not mean we cannot consider our past experiences or mistakes as useful references. Nor does that mean we cannot prepare and plan for the future. It does mean that making decisions based upon what is actually happening in the moment of right now is how great trend following traders organize their lives and produce their fortunes.
While not primarily a trader, Charles Faulkner brings a tremendously useful insight to the table. In all my years I can think of no one who does a better job of bringing traders and investors to a better understanding of themselves. Understanding yourself as a trader is the needed introduction to the journey of success in trend following profits.
Faulkner sees the world from a very wide and novel perspective, and you should too.
Case in point: A crucial lesson to understand is that when entering the market game, losses are part of the game. No matter the amount of experience you have, there will always be losses. That said, you want to make sure your losses are ones that you can handle—knowing that they are emotionally going to affect you.
People in sports understand this. Professional game players understand that to build your skill, you need to take losses and learn from them. You hope to play against people better than you because that is what makes you better.
Studying traders is very useful because everything in their world is extremely focused due to the intensity of their profession. What might take months or years to unfold in an ordinary life can unfold very quickly for traders.
For example, for many people the biggest purchase they make is a house or a car. And for many successful trend traders that kind of money can go through their hands within an hour, or even minutes.
This means, when trading, you don’t want to view money in terms of dollars as if you were going to buy a new car, but rather use the dollars to keep score. Putting yourself into that mental framework is critical. Releasing your mind from how you value money in terms of shopping, and instead focusing on it as a score during the game, is a huge first step.
—
A nice email came across my desk:
Good day Michael,
First I want to thank you for sharing your work with me and the rest of the world. I first read your work about 5 years ago and have not missed a podcast. Many podcasts I have returned to repeatedly for the timeless information and thought-provoking content. Another resource I don’t miss is the Epsilon Theory notes by Ben Hunt (thanks for introducing me to his work as well). I just wanted to suggest to you if you have not already read Ben’s latest note “I know it was you, Fredo” it is worth the time, like all of his notes. The information you have shared has not only changed my approach to the market but to nearly every aspect of my life. The exposure you provided me to the works of Charles Faulkner and Alan Watts two examples of many that have shaped the way I think about the world.
I felt it was time I thanked for what your work has meant to me.
My guest today is Barbara Fredrickson, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology, and the Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina. She is a social psychologist that conducts research in emotions and positive psychology.
The topic is her book Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
Inner-experiences and well being
The undoing effect
Positive negative ratio
The body’s definition of love
Depression
The idea of soul mates
Emotional connections
Relationship of health and positive emotion
“When two people connect over shared positivity there is a biochemical cascade within each person.” – Barbara Fredrickson
“Positive emotions are equally altering our action urges but instead of narrowing them, they broaden our thought and action repertoire so that we can see the big picture and potentially go in many possible directions, not just one direction.” – Barbara Fredrickson
Please enjoy my monologue Charles Faulkner on Goals; Special Episode. This episode may also include great outside guests from my archive.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio:
How to set goals
How to achieve your goals
Externalizing your inner-dialogue
The importance of milestones
“We are very good at looking back on things and seeing how we got somewhere, it’s the looking forward thing that throws us off from time to time.” – Charles Faulkner
My guest today is Brett Steenbarger, a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at New York State University, author of “The Daily Trading Coach,” “The Psychology of Trading,” and “Enhancing Trader Performance.” His newest work is “Trading Psychology 2.0: From Best Practices to Best Processes.” He is a trading coach, psychologist, author, blogger, and stock index trader.
The topic is trading psychology.
In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss:
The emotional “buy in”
Checklists
Finding a smooth equity curve
Repeated performance vs. deliberate practice
The role of fitness and health in trading
The moment of now
Systems trading vs. discretionary trader
Relationship between volatility and volume
“The fantasy of easy riches collides with the reality of what you need to do to prepare to win and I think that creates quite a dissidence for many beginning traders and ultimately leads them to leave the field.” – Brett Steenbarger
It is amazing how quick people are to forget how wrong one prediction is, only to move onto believing in another prediction. An excerpt from the chapter “Intoxication”, in Trend Commandments:
A bipolar prediction came across my desk recently: “If the market rises over the next several weeks, today will have been a good day to buy. However, no one can know the answer today. Every day there seems to be a surprise. We don’t know how to predict the behavior of foreign countries or their attacks.”
The nonsense doesn’t stop there. While on the East Coast recently, I was listening to an AM radio finance show. An older man called in to ask how he could buy into various commodity markets. He was worried that they had run too far already. The female host assured him that there was plenty of time and to jump into the market. The caller mentioned that he liked to buy low and was waiting for a pullback. The host told him to start preparing for hyperinflation. She named an African country to enhance her theory and leaned the conversation toward food insurance, needed of course for the coming descent into anarchy.
Think not knowing what you are talking about is new? Think again. President Herbert Hoover circa May 1930: “While the crash only took place six months ago, I am convinced we have now passed through the worst—and with continued unity of effort we shall rapidly recover. There has been no significant bank or industrial failure. That danger, too, is safely behind us.” Can’t just pick on old-timers. Consider the current day. Lloyd Blankfein (head of Goldman Sachs) said his firm would have survived the credit crisis without government help. The firm’s president, Gary Cohn, was more definitive: “I think we would not have failed. We had cash.” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner countered, “None of them would have survived” without government help.
More contradicting rhetoric from a 2010 60 Minutes interview reinforces the propaganda spell cast:
Scott Pelley: “Is keeping inflation in check less of a priority for the Federal Reserve now?”
Ben Bernanke: “No, absolutely not. What we’re trying to do is achieve a balance. We’ve been very, very clear that we will not allow inflation to rise above two percent or less.”
Pelley: “Can you act quickly enough to prevent inflation from getting out of control?”
Bernanke: “We could raise interest rates in 15 minutes if we have to. So, there really is no problem with raising rates, tightening monetary policy, slowing the economy, reducing inflation, at the appropriate time. Now, that time is not now.”
Pelley: “You have what degree of confidence in your ability to control this?”
Bernanke: “One hundred percent.”
That confidence seems misplaced when you consider Bernanke’s words but a few years before:
In 2005, Bernanke said: “We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.”4 In 2006, Bernanke said: “Housing markets are cooling a bit. Our expectation is that the decline in activity or the slowing in activity will be moderate, that house prices will probably continue to rise.”
In 2007, Bernanke stated: “At this juncture…the impact on the broader economy and financial markets of the problems in the subprime markets seems likely to be contained.”
Worse yet? Bernanke told the Senate Banking Committee in March 2011 that he saw “little evidence” that the stock market was a bubble, but provided certainty with this ditty of a response: “Of course, nobody can know for sure.” Why again do we care what this man says?
Not only can the pros not understand the data, but the conclusions they draw are almost always wrong.
Feedback in that adds to my thought:
Hi Mike, thought you might enjoy these. I listen to some of the BBC “More or less” podcasts, found this one (spurious correlations) when scrolling through their archives. So many out there (not just in finance) tend to torture data to find what supports their bias. The podcast and site do a good job at poking some fun at those tendencies.
When asked about trend following becoming “overpopulated” a Richard Dennis quote is often best:
“I don’t think trading strategies are as vulnerable to not working if people know about them, as most traders believe. If what you are doing is right, it will work even if people have a general idea about it. I always say you could publish rules in a newspaper and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline.”
Psychology and following the rules are paramount–bottom line. Consider more from an excerpt from The Complete Turtle Trader:
The techniques that Dennis and Eckhardt taught the Turtles were different from Dennis’s seasonal spread techniques from his early floor days. The Turtles were trained to be trend-following traders. In a nutshell, that meant that they needed a “trend” to make money. Trend followers always wait for a market to move; then they follow it. Capturing the majority of a trend, up or down, for profit is the goal.
The Turtles were trained this way because by 1983, Dennis knew the things that worked best were “rules”: “The majority of the other things that didn’t work were judgments. It seemed that the better part of the whole thing was rules. You can’t wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want to have an intuition about a market.’ You’re going to have way too many judgments.”
While Dennis knew exactly where the sweet spot was for making big money, he often fumbled his own trading with too many discretionary judgments. Looking back, he blamed his pit experience, saying, “People trading in the pit are very bad systems traders generally. They learn different things. They react to the [price] ‘tick’ in your face.”
Feedback from a listener that addresses Richard Dennis:
Hi Michael,
Hope you are doing well. Again, I appreciate everything, specially your commitment to the trend following podcast. In a recent back to back [other podcast] between [name] and [name] they address an important question:
—
Q: What lessons do you take from the fall of Richard Dennis? One of the biggest swingers at the Board of Trade…great trader…not only that but he believed he could replicate trading skills and did so successfully. He trained a whole generation of people who came up [and] manged billions…and then he basically goes and explodes. What is the practical lesson for your audience here?
A: Speaking to the trend following school in particular (and various trend followers who blew up or bled out): I do believe that certain trading styles and methodologies can suffer greatly from overpopularity. When there are too many people following a widespread strategy, and not enough differentiation among that active group, the strategy can be degraded to the point of no longer working.
—
Personally, I don´t agree with that argument because market trends have been persistent over time. As Howard Marks said: “We don´t have to worry about everybody becoming to prudent or to wise, because we are talking about human nature.”
I would appreciate your insight on this argument.
Peace,
[Name]
I don’t see any argument. My views on this are answered across 2 books comprehensively (the question above has some inaccuracies for starters):
My best response is in about 180,000 combined words (that is not a dodge; reality is that my answer is long). And yes I talk about the good and bad of Richard Dennis, but the good far outweighed the bad.
