I'm curious how many people consider themselves sort of born to trading. What I mean by that is that I'm not, for me it is kind of forced, I'm not a natural. But when I was very young I knew a natural trader, and his specialty in the beginning was trading cards i.e. baseball cards, star wars cards, trading cards for television shows, from cereal boxes, he was just a natural at it. He'd spend a good portion of his after school time riding around on his bicycle engaging the other kids in this kind of trading and had a huge collection of cards. Later I knew this same person to trade the kind of patches that scouts would sew on to the arms of their uniforms. When you were young, were you like that ? Random question just because I'm curious.
I do think I was. You need to have a personality that thrives in chaos and can live with the uncertainty that comes with trading.
To me, that sounds more like a natural "trader" using the word in the sense of "businessman" rather than with specific relevance to "trading" financial instruments? (But maybe there's some degree of overlap between the two?). What's he doing now (if you know)? No ... but I was fairly autistic (and didn't have a bicycle): my gift was for math and anything related to it; finished high school when I was "too young" to do anything, including going to college, and started looking at index and currency charts and reading trading textbooks, with quite a while to go, and plenty of time to practice/play on demo/sim accounts, before I was old enough to open a real one. People think I was a "natural trader" just because I started so young, but the reality's different: I was a "natural trader" like all the people who are described as having become "overnight" successes after their many years' consistent hard work which nobody else had seen. But there you have it: people are often attracted to outcomes without acknowledging the processes that produce them, aren't they? Alfred Brendel was for decades one of the world's most successful, brilliant and inspired concert pianists, and people (in the world of classical music) often talk about how "gifted" he was, and what a "natural", without ever discussing the reality that he spent a decade before that practising on his own for 8-9 hours per day, including just playing scales for 2-3 hours per day. (Malcolm Gladwell has written plenty about the underlying realities behind related examples of people who are widely seen as just "a natural".)
I think there was more to it than just business skills. It wasn't just the relationships he could create with people, or being able to pull them into trading with him, etc, which I would consider very entrepreneurial ... but also that he knew his "book" or portfolio, he just had a knack for knowing exactly what cards were worth, how many he had (from memory), what he'd be able to trade them for, who wanted them, etc .. he just seemed to always be focused on how to turn whatever he had into "more", he had a gift for it. Edit, and no, I don't know what he does now ... but i wouldn't surprise me AT ALL if he were a trader in the markets. Or a used car salesman lol.
There are certain personality types that are more adapted for trading. If you want the details some of the traits are: logical, high IQ, non-emotional, organized but at the same time can thrive in chaos, having no ego, and also emotionally stable. That last one is a big one. Hehe
Sure, knock me out with that one! I don't find the smartest guy in the room makes the best trader. I found over the years they were too focused on finding the best way to do things that they did not act fast enough. On the AMEX floor we had a large number of the best Bridge players in the world. All with very high IQs. Sometime their IQ helped them learn quickly and sometimes they were hindered by it, Bob
It's a formula. Like cooking. Having a high IQ is part of the formula. The more you have of each the better. Obviously having a high IQ and having emotional issues is a bad thing.
There's undoubtedly a significant correlation between bridge-playing skills and trading skills, in my opinion. My own theory is that that particular correlation is much more significant than the one between poker-playing skills and trading skills, but also much less significant than the one between backgammon-playing skills and trading skills. I attribute the undeniable fact that one typically sees these correlations being discussed and commented on in inverse frequency to their significance to the simple reality that there are far more poker players than bridge players, and again far more bridge players than backgammon players - in other words, it's just a form of selection bias.