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Traders Intuition
If you’re a driver sometimes you just KNOW the person in front of you is going to cut you up. You can’t put your finger on why, but you sense it, hang back, and sure enough he pulls right across you. A certain accident if you hadn’t backed off the throttle.
But how did you know that idiot was about to rearrange your paintwork?
Intuition.
Your brain took in a dozen different data points and came up with a conclusion. Just like when you meet a new person and get an uneasy feeling. Something’s just not quite right. Later on, they turn out to be an unsavoury character. Your intuition picked up on something and a mini alert went off in your mind. His tone, body language, eyes, attitude – it just all mixed together into a big red flag.
Trading is no different.
As a discretionary trader, one of our main jobs is to build intuition.
A gut instinct to just hold off that long for a few more minutes, or immediately pull the trigger on that short. A feeling that can be developed into something you trust and listen to. But that’s not something we start out with.
One of the problems with trusting our intuition too early in our trading career is that we have none.
Intuition takes time to develop, screen time, observing, watching, and gathering data.
So when we have acted on our intuition in the past in trading, it hasn’t served us. We discard it as a ‘useless emotion’ and spend the next years trying to suppress it!
I think that’s totally wrong.
Today, think about how you can allow your intuition to play a part in your trading.
I’m not recommending just allowing your intuition to make every trading decision, that would be chaos… But perhaps you allow the intuition to have some input.
Eg: Your strategy signals a long, the filters are met, the trigger shows, and your intuition can choose whether or not to pull the trigger.
The key here is to not berate yourself if it’s ‘wrong’ (because if you do that, your intuition won’t get a chance to flourish)
Write down why you thought what you did and work on improving it. Solid intuition can’t predict the market, but it can certainly help you catch good moves and avoid substandard plays.
12 Ways to Develop Intuition
Want to develop intuition more?
This is a cool article “12 ways to develop intuition”
I don’t agree with them all (11 is a good example… that’s not my bag, maybe I should be more open-minded!)
Number 5 is to do a technology fast. I’m a big fan of carving out some thinking time and space.
Worth a read.