Self-doubt and the Goldilocks Principle
Recently I sat with a client during one of his live trading sessions and invited him to think out loud ...
Experiencing Grace on Demand
I have a noisy internal critic. When I make a mistake, it blurts all sorts of expletives at me. When ...
Reducing Indecision with Sword Training
Some years ago while running my hedge fund, I went through a period of indecision. I would line up my ...
Losing my Macro Identity
Looking out the window toward the almost silent port of Hong Kong, I was waiting for my appointment to pitch ...
Shhh to your Inner-critic
As a trader, fund manager and investor over the past 25 years, I’ve made more mistakes than I could care ...
Escaping the Noise
Mood is contagious. Measuring collective mood is difficult. As an old trader, my proxy for collective mood has been the ...
Blind Spots and their Impact on Performance
Many of us have self-critical voices in our heads that keep us focused on what we perceive is wrong with ...
Mid-life crisis of Meaning or Competence?
I’ve had my share of mid-life crises. As far as I can tell, the only real benefit of having multiple ...
How or Why? On the Path to Self-Awareness
I’ve been practicing various forms of meditation since 1994. Having started my career as a graduate on the Foreign Exchange ...
I won, I’m right. I lost, I’m unlucky.
Understanding our cognitive and behavioral biases is an important ingredient in maintaining consistent investment performance. The self-serving bias (Miller and ...
I’m in a hole. Why can’t my mind stop digging?
When something goes awry in life, whether professionally or socially, we have an ability to replay events in our ...
I’m stressed, so everything is a Mole that needs a whack!
As investment professionals, we’ve all heard managers referred to as “stopped clocks”, being right only twice a day. I was one such manager, being bearish for a good 10 years of my 25-year investment career. Every risk that I perceived was like a game of “Whack a Mole”, causing me to see only selling opportunities. Little did I know that my body’s physiological response to stress made it difficult for me to change my way of thinking. Understanding your body’s stress response mechanisms is an important factor in objective investment decision making.