Soros would get in ASAP and then post-justify the position - speed was the essence. A pain in his back would tell him to get out or reverse. I don't know him personally, I might add.
I read the article about Soros and his back too. Basically, you get instincts -- your subconscious mind is processing all of the information that took years for you to work thru and make sense out of. For example, I recently started trading futures. Most people would think I'm an idiot because I'm basically only using daily and hourly charts along with various sentiment indicators I track. However, I'm only looking for 1 or 2 big trades a day. I'm still in the early stages of this but I was very good at "forecasting" daily moves in the market so I wanted to see if this would work trading futures. We'll see how it goes but I'm going against a lot of "conventional" wisdom on how you should trade. Nevertheless, I'm a firm believer than "conventional wisdom" is usually wrong and that you have to develop your own way of trading.
I think that everyone is different but look at warren, he has some type of intuition that helps him trade. As he says, "some people were born to help others etc... I was wired to know the market."