KEY POINTS:
Great traders are like performance artists, says a visiting psychologist. Most are born with a talent for trading but need years of practice to develop the skills.
Brett Steenbarger, a US psychologist specialising in training traders, was in New Zealand last week passing on tips.
He said using psychological techniques could assist traders to be more successful.
"All traders have two realities - risk and uncertainty," said Steenbarger. "You're making decisions - sometimes with a lot of money - with a lot of risk and a lot of uncertainty and many emotions come into play."
Which is where Steenbarger can help. His background in psychology - he has a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Kansas - and interest in trading has led to work as a trading coach.
"This was an opportunity to bring the psychology and the trading together - to work with people as a psychologist but to help them with their trading performance," Steenbarger said.
He said emotions caused problems for traders because they triggered a "fight or flight" response, causing blood to flow away from the decision-making centres of the brain.
"At the times we are most emotionally worked up the blood is in the wrong part of our brain to make good, calm decisions and that's one of the reasons traders need to learn emotional self-control so that when there's a lot of risk and a lot of uncertainty they can make calm, reasonable decisions."
Steenbarger trains the traders in techniques to deal with a range of emotions - negative feelings if they are in a slump, overconfidence when things are going well or impulsive, rash decision making.
The goal, says Steenbarger, is to make traders their own trading coaches.
From his own trading experience Steenbarger discovered he was making 80 per cent of his profits in the morning. "I was trading much more successfully in the morning than in the afternoon and during the middle of the day I was losing money," he said.
A solution for Steenbarger would be to concentrate on the morning trading because that was when he was better at picking up the price and volume patterns.
"Here I am a psychologist. I have a PhD, I've been trading many years myself and I still make some of the emotional mistakes. You can hope for perfection but in reality we're all pretty fragile," he said.
What Steenbarger finds hardest is working with traders who don't have the skills for the job.
Successful trading can take years of watching different markets and learning the patterns, he said.
"Psychology helps but it doesn't substitute for that learning curve," said Steenbarger.
"It would be like if they wanted to be a professional rugby player. They could come to me as a psychologist but what can I say to them that is going to give them the skills to get on the field with the All Blacks?
"You have to have a certain amount of skill and practice and sometimes traders look to psychology for the answer but the answer is the learning curve."
