TheMotorcycleBoy wrote:odysseus2000 wrote:Trading the markets is about reacting to changes and being able to admit that you have made a mistake and change very rapidly. Anyone trained in the hard sciences, engineering, medicine etc will have severe troubles trying to trade the markets due to the absence of well defined and inviolate rules that characterise these other disciplines. I hold a PhD in Nuclear Physics making me acutely aware of the differences and how the wrong thought pattern will get you killed in the markets.
Nuclear Physics is a "hard science", right? In your book? It most certainly is mine.
It's like everything.
People have remarkable aptitudes & abilities & although most of the population find some things extremely difficult, a small part of the population find them relatively easy. Often such folk don't realise what gifts they have & assume that anyone could do what they do & that they can likely do any thing.
In practice, at least in my experience, people who are super skilled at one thing often can do well in related disciplines, so e.g. physicists can do things that use the same skill set, but when they move from logic based things into emotional based things they struggle.
They always want to e.g. apply physics based methods to things that are all about emotion & crowd behaviour. If you look at most technical analysis it is all physics techniques & mostly of limited applicability to markets.
If you look at traders who make very large amounts of money they often do poorly at logic type disciplines but are often sports fans seeing what are the strength, weakness & turning points very easily in emotional endeavours & combine this with very strong risk management.
It is quite humbling to see how useless logic skills are for the vast majority of human endeavours. God or nature, depending upon your beliefs, knows this and makes very few people skilled in logical thought as these small numbers can easily do the complicated stuff that the vast majority of the population needs.
Regards,