MAKING TRADING HUMAN AGAIN

📈 TRADER PSYCHOLOGY

MAKING TRADING HUMAN AGAIN 🤝💹

Computers dominate all trading. 🤖💻 It's truly been the decade of Virtu and Citadel, and the glory days of the individual prop trader are as quaint as the pictures of fat sweaty guys battling it out in Chicago pits. 🏋️‍♂️🏦

Execution has become so efficient that brokers offer free trades and still make tons of money from kickbacks on the spread. 💸💰 There is no argument that you can no longer compete with a robot on a sub-second level. The machines will always beat you. ⏱️🤖

Yet anyone who has ever run an algo over time knows just how stupid computers can be. 🤦‍♂️🖥️ Like idiot-savants, they are excellent at producing one single task well but can’t adjust to even the slightest change of environment. 🌪️

Our greatest asset as humans is our ability to lie. 🤥 Without lying, poker would be a dry boring game between machines, and financial markets would have all the excitement of a cell phone bill. 😴📱 It is precisely the messy, inefficient friction introduced by lies and random human activity that keeps markets from devolving into perfectly efficient engines of boredom. 🔄📊

Aside from lying, humans excel at one other activity that binary systems like computers simply cannot master well - pattern recognition. 🔍👁️ 200,000 years on the African plain and several billion neurons later have taught us to take note of even the slightest change in the environment. 🌍🧠

Kids do this naturally. 👧👦 Move your 5-year-old’s favorite toy just a few inches off-angle on a shelf, and they will notice it right away. 🧸📐 It’s always astounding how little kids would instantly sense even the most minute changes in their environment, such as a blinkering lightbulb in the lobby of an apartment building. 💡🏢

That's why visualization tools are so valuable for human traders. 📊👨‍💻 We may not be able to calculate at several billion times per second, but we are very good at identifying key pattern changes on the chart. 📈🔍 And just like the hunter-gatherers on the African plain, the more we do it, the better we get. 🏹🧠