You can learn a lot from listening to the pilot who just landed his plane in the Hudson River. No fear, no panic, no loud voices. He just made a decision and lived with it. Listen to his radio call. He states very unemotionally that he is landing in the hudson. The controllers, who sound equally indifferent about the situation, treat it like its another day at the airport. This is the emotions you need to have when trading. In this situation, over 150 lives are at stake drowning in a cold river. When you trade, there are no lives on the line. You will not be drowning in the river. Listen to this radio call where the pilot makes a decision not to land at Teterboro and puts it down in the river. <object classid='clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000' codebase='http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0' width='320' height='270' id='yfop'><param name='movie' value='http://d.yimg.com/cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop.swf' /><param name='flashvars' value='id=11885839&shareEnable=1' /><embed src='http://d.yimg.com/cosmos.bcst.yahoo.com/up/fop/embedflv/swf/fop.swf' width='320' height='270' name='yfop' type='application/x-shockwave-flash' pluginspage='http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer' flashvars='id=11885839&shareEnable=1'></embed></object>
LOL. Trading is not like landing in the hudson unless you are gambling with no clear cut strategy. It is making sure you only make good trades. It is successfully taking off and landing over and over again just as making smart trades that correlate with your rules. Having to land in the hudson is like your account freezing with hundreds of thousands in short positions while the market is making a very strong weekly rally.
You miss the point behind this thread. This is the "psychology" section. The "psychology" behind this is that the pilot and controllers kept calm, smooth. mature and decisive in their actions during a life-threatening event. The same calm, smooth, mature decisiveness is required in trading. However, most guys on elitetrader probably could not keep so calm during any event; life threatening or not.
Actually it's very relevant thread for this forum. I am amazed how the guy sounds considering at that moment he knows he has a very good chance to die or at least get severely injured. And it makes me feel stupid for being such a whiny bitch.
Most people can probably be conditioned to remain calm under pressure, after all it is required in many jobs. Pilots, soldiers, firefighters, police, paramedics, doctors, traders etc. Most people will crack at some point, but usually due to prolonged exposure to high levels of stress rather than a life-or-death situation.
I dont want to be a chauvinist, but I see women in offices crack all the time during routine workplace events. There is no way the women I know could EVER pilot that plane or handle themselves in such conditions. This is why most traders are male. You really need to be calm and collected in trading otherwise you shouldnt trade, at all.
could be because we evolved to be the sex that takes on the most dangerous risks naturally. maybe males have the ability to endure the extremes of stress or the ability to supress/condition ourselves shorterm to potentially, the most catastrophic, stressful outcomes?
99.9% of the time you're right. For some traders, 100% of the time you are right. Let's just say you're trading an illiquid stock, with a relatively large position, or even a medium thickness stock, and you have some large spoof orders well below the market. Suddenly, you get filled on the spoof before you can cancel. If you're long 15,000 shares, and get filled on a 50,000 share spoofed bid, you have now 65,000 shares to work out of. You can't just market out, because there is nothing in the book. You can't just start hitting the bid 5000 shares at a time. In that scenario, you must be as calm as the pilot in the video.
Yes it is, if you have fat fingers. "Oh $hi7, I put out a 1k share order in an illiquid bastard with a 50 cent spread that only trades twice a day and managed to "hit the hudson' by dumping my shares on the only one other dumb guy in the world who trades this stock."