Today's best practice comes from reader Daniel Martin Schulz from Hamburg. He describes a cognitive priming strategy that he has found effective in his trading preparation:
"Thinking back to high school and
university times, one technique that often provided me with a welcome boost
before important tests the next morning was to review particularly important
material right before going to sleep (and I mean right before the head hits the
pillow, virtually the last thing before sleeping, except maybe kissing your
significant other good night). It continues to amaze me how the material thus
reviewed “sticks”. It must be something about how our brain consolidates information
and learned content during sleep (I am sure others have written about it but I
have no link or article ready).
I do not review a huge amount of
charts – only a handful of print outs of the markets I followed very closely
during the day, that I traded and/or that I intend to trade the next session. I
use 4 time frames for each market (daily, hourly, 15 min, 5 min – but these
details are unimportant and the time frames will vary from trader to trader).
What will not vary is that we can "seed" our unconscious/sleeping
brains with something to work with during the night that way. A small advantage
for sure – but ours is a business of hunting the ever so slight edge."
Daniel's review strategy is effective because it reduces the impact of interference from the processing of subsequent events. Research suggests that an important part of creativity is an incubation process in which we relax our focus following intensive immersion in a problem. Daniel uses sleep as that incubation period, achieving a kind of seeding of the mind. This might aid both the recall of information studied and the integration of that information into fresh trading ideas.
Further Reading: Paying the Tuition for Intuition
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