Ten Minutes With Tate Let’s Talk About Friction…..Again
All trading systems contain friction and friction extracts a fee from the trader. The more you can do to identify and minimise sources of friction the more profitable a system becomes.
The Way You Talk To Yourself Matters
This may seem somewhat tangential to trading but psychology is psychology. Self-talk can either be a generator of performance or it can be self-limiting – the trick is to notice when the inner couch becomes the inner critic.
Trade What You See
One of the most interesting parts of trading is the role of the human brain as an interface between you and the market. Having a complex filtering mechanism that is the repository of all your emotions sitting between you and the raw sources of information you need presents a complication. Consider the image below. This…
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Active Investors Need to Think About the Odds
Although investing is far noisier and uncertain than most card games, it is also an activity where understanding the odds is critical. While investors may feel uncomfortable talking about their decision making in probabilistic terms, it is inherent in everything we do – whether we are explicit about it or not. Much like assessing our…
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Everything is Obvious
The dominance of US equities has been one of the most significant features of financial markets over the last decade. The sheer magnitude of outperformance makes it easy to claim that it has simply been a case of an in-vogue market enjoying a substantial and unsustainable valuation re-rating, but that’s not quite true. Although a…
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Daniel Kahneman on Thinking, Fast and Slow
Trading is a profession that taxes our ability to view problems rationally and in a probabilistic manner. Daniel Kahneman highlights this issue in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. As expected the majority of poorly performing traders believe it is about having the right coloured lines on their charts of hanging off every pronouncement made…
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Ten Minutes With Tate Well That Sucked
There is no doubt that trading is a difficult business – there is the illusion presented by the internet and then there is the reality of managing a business day after day. And as with all business progress is not linear – it has ebbs and flows. Unlike the majority of other businesses in trading…
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The Value of Holding Yourself Back
I was struggling. I was in my competitive running days, in the best shape of my life, knocking out workouts I couldn’t imagine, but races were not going well. I just couldn’t put it together. I gave myself one last shot before packing in the bags for that season. In two weeks I was going…
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Ten Minutes With Tate The World Will End…..Eventually
There is an old adage – garbage in, garbage out. Stemming from the world of computer science it is equally applicable to markets. If you are feeding your brain the wrong things then your internal software will be shaped by this and predictably the result of this will be ruinous
