Two questions: 1. Why don't we create a trading company then go to Harvard & MIT and start hire the A+. Will we make lots of money? You know the answer. 2. How do we measure exactly intelligence? What is really the definition of intelligence? Is that just having high success in science, in life or both?
In response to 1: Intelligence and academic success alone does not make a single individual a good trader, of course, but... ...some of the top hedge funds such as Rentech do employ a lot of these people. Maybe not as pure traders, but still...
Trying to equate sport reflexes to video game ones is total nonsense. All reflexes are different. Athletes do not necessarily need them in some sports, they are irrelevant. Ppl usually look at basketball, baseball and football for reflexes, but there is a whole world of sports outside that. The funniest part is that you do not really understand what a reflex reaction is. It does not touch the decision making process, it is executed in the neural network of the limb, and the only way the brain gets involved is on visual or audio stumuli which often set off the reaction. In terms of trading, it's not of much benefit, more of a handicapp unless you are scalping a set up that is very repeatable. Like instantly hitting NX when short scalping with bullets because you saw an uptick. That's not trading, thats scalping order flow and managing clients. Funny, I doubt you ever even been in the ring. The smartest fighters, and often best, know how to manipulate reflexes of their opponents. Especially in boxing and grappling. A controlled reflex is not really a reflex, it means you put thought into. Otherwise you are just reacting without thought. Tyson was an animal with a pea brain, he needed reflexes. Ali was more on the strategy side. Top fighter in the world, practically unbeatable, wins by strategy & thought. He never had good reflexes and he does not need them. Some boxers are so reflex oriented that you can set them off and set them up with a tap on certain points in certain positions. They are trained as such. These guys fight on brawn, conditioning & toughness. The other side fights with their brain. If you even follow any of the combat sports, you might realize which is more effective. You're talking about subjects you have little experience in. Making quick decisions does not equal reflexes. There is no decision making in reflex reactions. That is not why athletes seem to be preferred for trading. Certain personality traits are assumed of athletes, but it's not exactly a proven method for success in trading, just some logical assumptions. In fact, in my experience, the top traders I have dealt with are far from athletes. We're not talking about the pits here, where 6'5" jocks are needed so that they can push past everyone to get order fills. Ever experience how emotional dedicated athletes get in the heat of competition, win or lose? Not exactly favorable in trading situations.
Take the market test its the ultimate! On he whole I would say intellect is likely to be an impediment to market success especially if you are acustomed to being 'right' all the time. (I am and it is). If you have any sort of intellectual capability coupled with the most rudimentary understanding of the markets you would know that the answer to your question is an unequivocal no. O dear I just fed a troll, guess I am not as smart as I thought I was Cheers.
These tests are BOGUS man! Can you believe ME, only the best trader between Bleecker and 22nd street Nyc, I only got a 480 verbal 460 math on the SAT. Geez the stonedinvestor didn't break a thousand! AND I took some special course too-- then my score went down. Those IQ tests are BOGUS man! I mean when I was like six years old they threw my ass out of kindergarten. My crime drawing a big green monster on some IQ test! So you know how I feel about those, my poor mother she sent me into that room what schools was it>? I think Montessori, maybe Trinity by then, (I got kicked out of a bunch of places for different reasons) Anyway she sent my in there with her hopes and dreams attached to me... and they asked me to draw a picture of my mother on some IQ test and I drew this monster. This big green monster holding on to the empire state building. Now common' wouldn't you REWARD that? I was so proud of myself. Dismissed. And each one you get tossed from for these bogus reasons, it makes it harder to get into the next school. Ok the jungle gym flip with the kids on it I'll give you that one-- but later after I got caught shoplifting in order to payoff the large gals at PS 99 and throwing my brick size building blocks out my window-- not a bad thing unless you're in the penthouse CPW! Wow that brought some pain for dear ole' mom too-- I hit this guys hat with the block it was the size of several thousand pennies, anyway the dust settled and I'm living in the suburbs and these damn test again come back and haunt me again- like psychological test for fighting! Have you ever heard of such a thing!? It's outrageous! I mean kids throw down, or they used to way back when in NYC, I guess in the burbs they took a while to get to know me, but I'll tell you what- don't believe what you read someone always stepped up. There were takers got bless em'. Undefeated I might add except for this one " special " kid from the " special " school he must have been 33 years old, set back many times, he got a hold of me after I said something rude and he fought like his damn life depended on it. Retarded style non stop. After twenty minutes, like most things in life... I found myself looking for a good exit stategy. Anyway, I have to go. But No you don't need any test to be a trader just smart~ stoney
Amost anyone can be successful in trading. Excellent test results (The equipment testing IQ stuff) can be useful in shortening the path to great performance. Were you following a route dictated by a dichotomous key, you would quickly see where the departure is that is required to attain great success. Several of the reference documents in this thread and a couple of others that are posting substantive content back my view directly and completely. There are none that describe the opportunity of the markets and just what is possible. The path you are looking for is not being shown to you, for obvious reasons, as you have determined. Why do you think the list of the guys who got paid the most doen't have the capital that they were working with listed in the the report? lol.... Formulate what it takes to make your annual salary in a day. Obviously it takes a day. It takes two screens. Lets turn to the personal aspect for moment. You need to give instructions to the person who is going to get the job done during the day. He gets paid a commission to do what you say to do. The notes on that take about 5 minutes to jot down for the particular day's work he will do. About 5 things for him to keep in mind and keep track of. Lets go back in time to find out what led you to be able to write the notes for your broker to do the trading. We found that everyone who has posted here went down the wrong paths the dichotomous key offered them. You and I didn't go the wrong way. It is the same as the tests. The proctors always debrief us to find out what it is like. The dichotomous Q on how markets give you profits is one you haven't asked yourself nor figured out as yet. Why didn't the other posters get it either? Each time a person uses his intellect (or if it is absent, something else) to miss the Q's one afteranother, he steps farther away from a critical short, enriching pathway that broadens more and more into a fabulous highway. The first Q has the correct answer which is: through value change. Now you know that and you can look at it and stand on it and turn full circle to see what is round and about you. I take all value change. So I made up all the questions and all the choices of answers. I threaded the path. No one, roughly speaking makes up the questions, lists the answers in a priority of their value and uses the results to find the rest of the questions and their, relatively, valued answers. That path crossed your annual salary like a small bridge crossing a stream in 4 1/2 hours one day long ago. 31 trades in one equity involving only 100,000 shares in one stream of money that day. To trade what is available daily with 50 grand margin as a beginning trader (advanced beginner) in commodities is just a few questions down the dichotomous key and the daily net has reached 100,000 several times this year (it's posted in ET). So you have determined that the key leads to a counter intuitive place very soon. Yes it does take some intelligence to see that the markets are couter intuitive and that constantly refining and applying more smarts to opportunities can go astray to places like arbitrage and anomolies. I take all value change all the time You can see that this is not quant. What was the dichotomous question that separated me from the quants? Look at the next six questions. At first the key looks like it is going straight down a path. then you see how the questions fan it out so broadly. As you step way back and look you may be able to see that a spiral pattern may come into view and that you then see that regions are re-examined over and over much farther out from the beginning point. When do you leave one paradigm to enter another that is more appropriate? It is where the question appears that asks about the two matters of probabilistic or either non-probabilistic. Draw an x through every post in this thread to indicate that the person did not raise the Q and he is actually sitting on the wrong side of the line in the sand which you just crossed with me as you chose the right answer. Look back and see all the cities, all the buildings and all the offices and all the people who did not cross this line. Look in the universities and see that there are no courses being taught on this side of the line. This stuff comes up on about page 2000 in any book on the markets. Notice there is no page 2000 in any book. They poop out long before this. I use velobinder to bind the pages together on the topics and the illustrations. They go in folders in boxes on shelves. What does it look like in non probabilitic land after you have made the choice later to choose between axioms in models. Chose contraction and not nesting to leave the horizon of uncertainty behind. There you chose between robustness and opportuneness. That brings you to pernicious and propitions facets of opportunenss. You have to decide to deal with max and min. Max is minimal requirements always satified and min means sweeping sucess is always possible. By now you see you are just an obseerver of how the mind and intellect can be used to get to the place to be. BE DO HAVE. It is a binary trip. And it has nothing to do with probability. It is non probabilistic and that is VERY counterintuitve. A person is sitting at the end of the dichotomous key where he "knows that he knows" in one time setting of choice. That is NOW and he takes a minimum set of data (AND THIS IS NOT A SINGLE ELEMENT OF FREAKOUT DATA) and uses the opportuneness to assure sweeping success is possible in all NOWS one after another. NB: You will note that there is such a small sample of persons in the world who make money in non probabilisitic ways that the sample size is trivial and statisitically insignificant. The conclusion is that they never pay premiums to play) So what question is always on the table in a dichotomous form to be answered correctly? What is the MODE of the market NOW? The two answers are: continuation and change. For contiuation you repeatedly inquire: Am I on the right side of the market now? For change you take an action that includes two efforts: Taking profits, and rentering the market on the right side. How intellectually demanding is all of this? No one who posted so far has made the intellectual trip. So it may be deemed very difficult. Apparently, what makes it so difficult in formal institutions is that critical thinking has gone by the boards. It is not taught and there are no parts of the cirriculum that have a connection to critical thinking. The the informal learning sector (the financial industry) the chips are handed out for "biggering" instead of performing (making money with money) and thinking. Gaining employement is done in the traditional way: through credentialling by following the sheep and sheepskin path in addition to the social heritage and marriage path. My conclusion is that anyone I spend time with is either very rich or going to be very rich. If I or they are trading in the presence of "others", the those others are getting an "experience". Generally, my read time with a powerful and established big money trader is about 2 hours. I find that I can set up (as a list which I can dictate the coding strategy for) the automated backup he needs in less time than that. I make it a policy to not have any coding produced that could be reverse engineer able under any circumstances. So far no one in the industry has approached, intellectually, formally or informally, anything that comes out of the answers to the dichotomous key. This is because no one has used their intellectual capacity to do anything to speak of as yet. Review this post and give consideration to beginning to start to think. Just give yourself small doses for the next six months until you get warmed up a little mentally.
The title of this thread is incredibly naive. Absurd. Ignorant. Which of course begs the question: Would a person of superior intellect actually ask such a stupid fucking question? H