I saw on another thread that the consensus opinion is that hard work will only compensate for lack of talent up to a point in trading. The talent required includes patience and discipline, as well as other skills ie. pattern recognition. If we can determine what these other skills are it might be possible to put together a customized IQ test with some predictive value for trading success. And it might be possible to train those skills. If we can agree on pattern recognition, what other skills are essential? The trading time frame might affect the list, I'm a swing trader, I don't need the fast twitch skills of a scalper, if anyone is doing that anymore.
There are those words again. I wish I had some. But thankfully, Brett Steenbarger was right when he said that when you find your niche, you don't need much discipline, because following the rules is all you want to do.
When I first started daytrading in 1999, I soon discovered the "holy grail" almost immediately and was trading from 9:30 to 12:00, as much as 200 times a day. My favorites were the tech stocks like CISCO. Unfortunately, it doesn't work anymore. I had a source of quotes which was faster than my brokers and when the bid on that source was greater than the ask on my broker's source quotes then I would trade. It doesn't work anymore because the broker went out of business and I have never seen this phenomena since. I really believe that other holy grails exist but you are not going to find out about them from reading any of the many books on trading that I have read. All that other "stuff" will be of no consequence, what so every, when you do. Good luck.
Standard IQ tests aren't super-reliable measures of academic performance in general, there are other important factors as well, so I'm not sure a trading IQ test can do what you want it to. Never mind the vast gulf between discretionary trading and mechanical trading, ie., between trading as an art and trading as a science, even in the narrow confines of technical analysis, no one person can be competent at all of it. For example, the only pattern recognition I'm interested in is trend or no trend. Any more detailed than that (triangles versus wedges, flags versus pennents) and my eyes glaze over. So does that mean I've failed the trading IQ test even if I can make a living at it without knowing that stuff? I could never become a CMT because it requires mastering a lot of TA stuff that I not only believe but know for a fact to be garbage, yet I have mastered some useful TA stuff that I know isn't covered in the CMT course. Sometimes certification is overrated.
Plenty of people with genius level IQ, excellent pattern recognition skill, strong mathematical understanding, successful careers as doctors, accountants, engineers, and so on, fail at trading. Profitable ideas are a dime a dozen. Profitable systems can be developed from these ideas through hard work, or solid mentoring. With a proven profitable system in hand, even with automation, many traders still struggle because they fail to execute their plan, or they override the signal and trade management of their automated system. The traders I've had the chance to observe trading a plan successfully have one thing in common: The ability to disengage their needs, their self-worth, their ego, from the outcome of individual trades. Based on this I concluded that a strong indicator of success is the ability to do something painful, or deflating to the ego, right now in order to obtain something you want very badly. Zig Ziglar said, "The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want right now." What a trader wants right now is to feel certain about the outcome of a trade, to remove the risk of loss by moving a stop to break even quickly or by taking a very small profit, to be proven right by holding a loser in the hopes that price will at some point do what it should be doing, to get a better entry price by positioning based on opinion of price direction prior to an actual trade entry signal... What a trader wants most is to make a living or generate wealth (or both) by trading.
1. Actually having the rocks to put the trade on. (LOL) 2. Stay with your convictions 3. Trade the market that in front of you 4. Realize that by the time it hits the media it's too late 5. Stocks discount the future (see # 4) 6. Don't overthink it. 7. Markets overshoot in both directions 8. Do your homework 9. Commodities often tell you what will happen 10. Watch the dollar 11. See #1 (lol) All kidding aside, barring a tape bomb from the Gov. or Europe, or, or, or Buy low, sell high (yuk, yuk yuk)