The Trader's Pendulum: The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Traders

Chapter 8Habit #5: Understand and Exploit Your Unique Trading Personality

Do you know that the United States has an alarming high school dropout rate? It was reported that around 1.3 million students drop out annually (Monrad 2007). That's 1 every 25 seconds, or in other words, for every five students who enter high school every year, one of them will quit before completing their diploma.

Researchers around the nation have studied the motivations for the devastating dropout rate. One of the studies reported that the main reasons for students quitting prematurely included uninteresting classes, lack of motivation, financial issues, and academic challenges (Bridgeland 2007). Researchers generally agree these are some of the causes for the high dropout rate, but some of them ask, “So what are the causes for these causes?” or, in other words, what is the root cause for the issue?

Eventually, a group of researchers, educators, successful businesspeople, social activists, and highly successful figures in society suggested the root cause for the high dropout rate was a one-size-fits-all academic system failing the schoolchildren (Goyal 2012).

If you think about it, the school system is training everyone to become a professional even though not everyone is “naturally talented” to follow that path. Think about how the schools have made students sit through test after test, with no relevance to what students will do for a job as an adult. Think about how students are prescribed a “correct ...