Archive for March, 2009
Enhancing Trading Performance
Students of trading are at a huge disadvantage relative to students of chess. Chess books document the performance of centuries of experts in actual tournament situations. Because of this, chess students can create and play through almost any challenging situation imaginable, drawing upon the accumulated wisdom of experts. Trading possesses no such database. Trading books, unlike chess texts, are not annotated compilations of the trading decisions of objectively rated experts. One cannot use trading books to recreate trading sessions or to systematically explore trading decisions and their alternatives. Chess books lend themselves to independent deliberative practice; trading books present ideas outside the context of actual trading.
As a result, traders tend to spend little time in the systematic practice that is the single greatest predictor of chess expertise—not to mention expertise in music, athletics, and dance. This violates a principle from the performance research that is so striking that it might even be called a law