The Mental Strategies of Top Traders: The Psychological Determinants of Trading Success

2.6. CASE STUDY ON RECOGNIZING GOAL-DIRECTEDNESS

Whether you are looking for new hires or trying to help move your current employees (or yourself) toward greater avenues of success, you must recognize that people approach goals differently. The more you can understand their underlying personality dynamics, the more you will understand how they function in the goal-setting environment and how they interact with their challenges, their teammates, with management, and others, how they handle stress, how they respond to setbacks, drawdowns, and criticism, and what you can expect in terms of working with them.

To give you an example of how to do this, let's consider Fred, a 30-year-old portfolio manager who is very smart and talented. Fred has a number of years of experience working in merger arbitrage in a large banking institution and is now functioning as a portfolio manager in a large hedge fund. Let's explore a composite of his strengths and weaknesses. As you read through the information, look at each characteristic through the frame of goal-directedness.

2.6.1. Fred's Strengths: The Three Cs

1. Confident

2. Competitive

3. Persuasive communicator

2.6.1.1. Confident

Fred is very confident in his abilities and desires to work alone, without a high degree of supervision. He functions best on tasks that allow him to develop and implement plans that clearly establish outcomes and performance but leave the actual methods undefined. Because Fred likes to make choices, he is more of an action-oriented ...