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

1.9. CHAPTER IN REVIEW

1. While no one single personality profile is correlated with successful investing, we can find various combinations of talents that seem to increase the chances of success by carefully:

   • Reviewing a person's psychological tests, personal history, life experiences, past professional experiences, and ways of dealing with risk, stress, life events, success, and failure

   • Conducting intense interviews and carefully considering reference checks

   • Evaluating how an individual handles research projects to assess the quality of his work, his diligence, his ability to think creatively, and his sense of urgency and thoroughness

   • Considering his capacity to function in terms of outsized performance targets, his ability to listen, and his ability to incorporate and process critical feedback about his performance by reviewing risk statistics

   • Examining his thought processes, his ability to troubleshoot, solve problems, assess complex situations, and identify the drivers influencing transformative events in companies

2. A few of the most important attributes of a successful trader are:

   • The ability to notice and separate emotional responses from the decision-making process

   • The ability to function with some degree of independence and autonomy while still following good risk management principles

   • The ability to stand outside oneself and one's concerns about images in order to function in terms of larger objectives

   • The ability to suppress ego and empower others to share ideas and best practices ...