Back and rested from a weekend trip to academia – The annual Society for Neuroeconomics meeting, held in Evanston this year, reviews a cornucopia of pre-publication research papers centered on the topic of decision making under risk and ambiguity. With everything from electrodes being implanted into patients who were having brain surgery for intractable epilepsy [...]

A year ago tonight I was merrily watching my Cleveland Browns actually win while on a Jet Blue flight to the CME’s Inaugural Global Financial Leadership conference when my first cell beep on landing was Bill Long calling to say LEH was BK and ML was BAC. 365 days after that watershed event we have [...]

Per the Washington Post “But in each instance, inexperienced officials, at times ignorant of other agency probes into Madoff, took his explanations at face value and did little to verify them.“ Why would anyone – no matter how inexperienced – take a potential criminal at face value? I mean no one intentionally tries to fail [...]

Figure out how to differentiate implicit learning from impulse.

It also brings up some thoughts about the markets really do work – or the infinite loop between fundamentals, facts and fear

Today Set the alarm for 6:40 am, but ended up going to bed pretty late. 6:40 am alarm rings, still super tired, so decide to sleep in till 7:30 and then see if I want to trade 7:28 wake up without alarm, feeling good. 7:45 ish, notice the market has really sold off. Want to [...]

There is this bizarre overlooked contradiction in much of what passes for trading wisdom – or at least smart trading psychology. On one hand, developing a trading strategy/tactics and a plan are OF COURSE the foundation to work on but on the other, the most successful firms ask their traders to spend years learning judgment while the independent/retail world is taught not to think!

Today’s neuroscience proves that the residual feelings resulting form one event can completely color your beliefs about the next event. It also proves you can’t act – or even make a decision – without emotional inputs. Therefore, managing those inputs – in the way that works – is a singularly profitable (and winning) endeavor.

object lesson in double-checking the exact state of one’s psychological capital before they take a trade. In my case, the bucket was TOO full and almost more importantly I didn’t realize that I was wanting something in particular – something having nothing to do with trading.

The arguably most famous and respected trading psychologist on the planet makes a point that we are not and should not be trading for personal development. I respectfully disagree. Playing the game wherein the object is to take money out of the hands of very many other smart people who are also pouring enormous resources [...]