Reblog: How To Find A Trading Style That Suits Your Personality
Having interviewed many of the greatest ever traders over many years in his Market Wizard series, many of whom expressed the important role personality plays in trading, Jack Schwager dedicated an entire chapter to the subject in his latest offering ‘The Little Book Of Market Wizards’, and even went so far as to say “if you get nothing else out of reading this book than the one following principle, it will still have been a very worthwhile endeavour: Successful traders find a methodology that fits their personality.”
To illustrate his point he contrasted the frenetic style of Paul Tudor Jones with that of the studious Gil Blake, but perhaps the simple yet profound contribution from Colm O’Shea was what stood out the most, as Schwager surmised here:-
“Traders must find a methodology that fits their own beliefs and talents. A sound methodology that is very successful for one trader can be a poor fit and a losing strategy for another trader. Colm O’Shea, one of the global macro managers I interviewed, lucidly expressed this concept in answer to the question of whether trading skill could be taught: ‘If I try to teach you what I do, you will fail because you are not me. If you hang around me, you will observe what I do, and you may pick up some good habits. But there are a lot of things you will want to do differently. A good friend of mine, who sat next to me for several years, is now managing lots of money at another hedge fund and doing very well. But he is not the same as me. What he learned was not to become me. He became something else. He became him.’”