What can be Learned from Psychopaths about Trading?

Psychopaths are people who don’t care about social rules and the media has made well known for committing awful crimes. Whilst this is true, it is also the case that many successful businessmen, lawyers, politicians and also traders share the same characteristics.
Of course successful people don’t usually commit crimes but they use the same skills when they deal with some problems in a work environment. For example, they focus on their goal, don’t care what other people think about them and do everything they can to achieve their goal.
Oxford University psychologist, Kevin Dutton explored the similarities between psychopaths and successful people and discovered that many, if not all, successful traders share psychopathic characteristics! In this context a successful trader looks the same after making 1 million dollars and after losing 1 million dollars. If you look at them you don’t know if he or she has just lost money or won. The reason why this helps is because if you don’t care so much if you are losing or winning then you can just be focused on your plan and follow it. Consideration is not given to whether friends will think that you are a loser or wondering if you have deserved taking a loss or not as it simply doesn’t matter and allows a complete focus on goals and do what can be done to achieve them.

For everyday traders it becomes increasingly difficult to follow your trading plan if after first big loss you become depressed and as a result change your strategy. There can also be a tendency to be too excited after making a big profit with the consequence that in future trades you will risk too much.
So just like a psychopath, you should be calm and follow your plan regardless of any of your short term results.
You “Can” Control Your Emotions and Win
Of course achieving this state of mind is not easy and if you approach trading with the same attitude as most people then you will likely take care if you lose your money or win. However, being normal is not a way to be a winning trader and you may have doubts that you can achieve the needed state of mind. I also doubted my ability but I persevered and know from my own experience that it is possible to become successful.

How to Achieve a Successful State of Mind
When you want to change your emotional behaviour you must first accept your current situation. If you are depressed or mad after taking a loss well OK it decreases your results. That said, it is not a reason to blame or punish yourself so just try to accept that fact without judging it.

Traders often think that they should be perfect and trade without any emotion but only robots are able to do this as they have no emotion and always do what you pre order or program them to do. It may seem a strange concept but as you are not a robot you will never be able to trade perfectly and from time to time you will make a mistake and especially when you are learning something new.
So start by accepting your current emotional behaviour. What’s next? Can you change it? Yes! For example, you may feel mad after taking a loss but it doesn’t have to happen automatically. After taking a loss you probably say something in your mind which makes you feel mad, for example “Oh no!”, swear or just scream. It creates an emotion of feeling mad which you later increase when you remind yourself that accident of taking a loss or comment on it.

Agreed Great film

And strangely my wife's favourite film......but then she was a trader in London in the 80's. :innocent: