Friday, January 15, 2010

A Cognitive Self-Appraisal for Traders

Yesterday's post offered a self-appraisal of emotional experience for traders. Now let's follow that up with a cognitive self-appraisal. See where you stand on these cognitive pairs:


PATIENT . . . . . . . . . . IMPATIENT

FOCUSED . . . . . . . . . . DISTRACTED

OPEN-MINDED . . . . . . . . . . CLOSED-MINDED

PREPARED . . . . . . . . . . UNDER PREPARED

CLEAR HEADED . . . . . . . . . . CONFUSED

ALERT . . . . . . . . . . FATIGUED


Your mind, not your hardware or software, is your ultimate trading tool. The quality of your thought and perception will be reflected in the quality of the actions you take.

If you correlate your emotional self-assessment (from the last post) with this cognitive assessment, you may be able to see patterns regarding how your emotional experience affects your processing of market data and patterns.

And those are likely to affect the trades you take, how you take them, and whether you take them.

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