Trading as a Performance Sport

For the past 15 years, I have served as a therapist, counselor, mentor, and advisor to the medical students and physicians at an academic health center. Most of the people I work with are bright, motivated, educated individuals who are free from debilitating psychological problems. Their goal in counseling is to bring their performance to a higher level. They know that if they are going to be competitive in a field such as orthopedic surgery or emergency medicine, they need to be firing on all cylinders.

Interestingly, their interests and needs are not unlike those of Olympic athletes, active traders, bodybuilders, concert musicians and others engaged in performance-oriented pursuits. They realize that, if they spend years honing their skills, they can ill-afford to have their state of mind interfere with their peak performance.

The hypothesis I'd like to share with you is straightforward: There is a core set of characteristics that distinguish the greatest participants in any field of endeavor-including mastering the markets. If you read Jack Schwager's interviews with such accomplished traders as Mark Cook, Linda Bradford Raschke, and Mark Ritchie, you'll notice a recurring theme: success in trading is as much a function of the qualities of the trader as the system being traded.

In his text entitled "Greatness", Professor Dean Keith Simonton points out that mastery of any domain requires approximately 50,000 "chunks" of information. This applies across different domains, from chess and sports to scientific research. To acquire such a wealth of experience and data, the great individual needs to be able to sustain focused attention on work for considerable periods. The psychologist Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi has found that this is possible because the creative person enters a pleasurable emotional state-a state of flow-when immersed in effortful activity. This intrinsic pleasure enables achievers to weather periods of uncertainty and discouragement on the way to success.

The implications of this line of research for trading are profound. Most texts on trading psychology emphasize such techniques as positive thinking and visualizations. These can be helpful, to be sure. But to transform oneself as a trader, it is necessary to transform one's state of consciousness. Traders lose when their mind states interfere with their natural processing of market data. To become a lean, mean, trading machine, it is necessary to cultivate the capacity to enter and sustain the flow state. Notice that Schwager found that most "Wizard" traders engage in extensive research and preparation before their trades. This is not simply a tool for scoping out the markets: it is mind-training, developing the trader's capacity to stay immersed in their craft. Simonton also examined the specific works of some of the most eminent creative individuals in different fields and came to a startling conclusion. The odds of generating a work of lasting merit did not increase over the creator's lifetime. That is, the greatest writers, artists, and thinkers produced the same ratio of clunkers to works of genius throughout their careers. They were successful, Simonton notes, because they simply produced more. Whether a given work becomes famous or not is a matter of natural selection. Creative talents who are more productive increase their odds of generating a memorable work.

Once again, the implications for trading are clear. Even master traders are likely to produce a fair number of clunker trades. Like power hitters such as Mark McGuire, they will often strike out on their way to slugging a number of home runs. To become a master trader, traders need to trade, and need to continually hone their skills. Persistence, especially in the face of adversity, is a quality shared by most of the Wizard traders.

Indeed, in his excellent text "The Road to Excellence", K. Anders Ericsson concludes that future expert performers engage in intensive training activities over a period of ten or more years in the cultivation of superior performance. Success, he finds, is a function of intensive, deliberative practice conducted while in a state of heightened attention and concentration.

Ericsson likens the mind's development under such training to the physical benefits of athletic training. Former Mr. Universe and bodybuilding coach Mike Mentzer has written extensively on the benefits of high intensity strength training. It is the intensity of the workout-not its duration-that contributes to physical development; only under brief, intense demands will the body devote the resources to its muscles that become manifest as physique. Ericsson points out that superior performers conduct similar "natural experiments" with their growth, achieving unusual cognitive mastery through repeated, intense skill rehearsal.

From this research, we can infer two reasons why traders fail. First, they become emotionally involved in their trades-eager for profits, despairing of losses-and thus exit the flow state needed for immersion in the learning experience. One cannot be immersed in an experience and also preoccupied with its outcome.

The second reason traders fail is less appreciated. They lack the sustained concentration and focus needed to benefit from intensive practice. Imagine going to the gym and lifting a 20 pound barbell a few times. Surely we would not develop our strength or physique under such conditions. The capacity for trading success remains similarly dormant when traders attempt to beat the market with part-time preparation, impulsive hunches, and untested strategies. When asked to identify a loser on the trading floor, Wizard Tom Baldwin told Jack Schwager, "Losers don't work hard enough…They don't concentrate…You can see it in their eyes; it is almost as if there is a wall in front of their face."

To these worthy observations, I would add the following. If market opportunities are born of inefficiencies inherent in human information processing, as behavioral finance researchers suggest, then the ability to profit from these opportunities requires the capacity to stand apart from such biases and patterns. One cannot simultaneously fall prey to human nature and profit from it. This requires a considerable measure of self-development, the kind that can only occur as the result of immersive experience and practice. Those who aspire to trading greatness must find some measure of greatness within. Such is the challenge and nobility of the path we've chosen.

Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY and a daily trader of the stock index futures markets. He is the author of The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003) and coeditor of the forthcoming The Art and Science of the Brief Psychotherapies (American Psychiatric Press, 2004). Many of his articles on trading psychology and daily trading strategies are archived at his website, www.brettsteenbarger.com.