I have always been curious about the relationship between personality types and the ability to trade stress free. I am a classic type A and tend to prefer short term trades. I trade futures every day and don't usually hold over night. I prefer to take many trades a day and exit quickly. I have to walk away from my screen with a stop in place to hold longer than 1 hour without getting trigger happy. I also tend to be very emotional about my trades and often get pretty physically and mentally worn out after a hard day of trading. Are there many stress free traders out there? I realize that the term STRESS in trading can be a wide open term. I would consider my self a stressfull trader because on an average I am not very relaxed. Yes I do have some pretty relaxed trading days but they are rare. I should have put a (none of the above) in the poll but oh well
Type B personality is someone who is more calm about things in general. Tends not to get emotionally worked up as easy as a type A. Type A is more excitable, has a hard time relaxing, likes to be doing something most of the time. When i am asking if you are a type A or B personality, I mean your usual state when not trading.
if you are usually pretty calm about life in general you are a type B personality. If you are stressful while trading you would be a (type B trading high stress). If you are usually pretty emotional and high strung about life in general, you are a type A personality but if you can somehow stay calm while trading, you would be a (type A trading low stress) I would expect most type A to be a bit more high strung while trading but that is the purpose of my poll. Are there type A low stress traders out there? I have been trading about 5 years and have gotten past the swearing and smashing things stage a year or so ago but I am still pretty high strung while trading. That might never change because of my personality?
If you delete your first post - you can delete the thread as well, and then reformulate your poll in a new thread. Seeming as there are no significant other posts by others yet, you still have time. BTW I consider myself very "high strung" when doing tight trades, but very relaxed to life in general. So it might be difficult for me to select an option in the poll. ;-)
Most people will consider the term stress as a negative term. When I use the term STRESS in trading that could also be what alot of traders consider a positive thing. Like EXCITEMENT, THRILL, etc. that is still a type of stress and will wear you out just the same at the end of a trading day. When you can trade without getting excited or your heart beating faster then you are a low stress trader.
================================ Type A is the turbo charged type; Type B may like to do lots of research, lots of the time,like I do There are personality blends for sure of the two types or four types, like Florence Littauer writes. Littauer , she gives helpful nicknames like to type a; Sanguine -''the talker'' Choleric-'' the worker'' Type b Littauer nicknames; Melancholy- ''the thinker'' Phlegmatic-'' the watcher'' It helps in understanding people; even with personality blends one of those nicknames will usually predominate.
It's really part of the old classic temperament/personality classification, and a well-known system is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. There is an online temperament sorter, a questionaire, which calculates your type of personality, and even crossover mixes between types. I remember I did one years ago, and got something like ENXJ - where the X was for T and F factors giving a mix of "field marshal"-type and "teacher" type. It was available from University of North Carolina - but got removed after some complaints from the Keirseys. Still the keirsey.com test seems to be exactly the same. ENTJ - "field marshal" - http://keirsey.com/personality/ntej.html ENFJ - "teacher" - http://keirsey.com/personality/nfej.html It's actually quite cool beacuse a lot of famous personalitys are also classified. It really helps a lot reading up on the other types and seeing that they definitely are not part of your personality. Try the test on http://www.keirsey.com/ . The test is available in English, Spanish, German, French, Portuguese, Norwegian, Swedish, Bosnian, Polish, Czech, Danish, Russian, Finnish, Ukranian and Japanese. The various temperaments are listed on http://keirsey.com/matrix.html . Also, the older descriptions (made from USENET alt.psychology.personality newsgroup discussions) from unc.edu is available at : http://typelogic.com/ - the ENTJ trademark is expecially funny: "I'm really sorry you have to die." The summary (from 1993) is available here : http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/psychology/alt.psychology.personality/FAQ.almost