Did our career ethos demand reactive or predictive decisions? What about financial trading?

It is right that most professions require predictive decision making. Engineers, doctors, entrepreneurs, lawyers, pilots.

Many of us from these disciplines have a go at financial trading in some form or other.

Why not apply the same predictive philosophy to trading that has always stood us in such good stead.

Mistake

Sorry, but that is mistake number one. To have any hope of success trading the financial markets, we need to change our career lessons of predictive bias to reactivity.

We all find this hard to do, it takes time to relearn, and most will never truly grasp the new concept.

We need to think of probability as the belief in an alternative outcome; it is not about the odds.

Highly probable trades are the essence of our (Slow Trader) strategy and paradoxically the most difficult to trade reactively.

Reactive, always

To do otherwise, to trade predictively rather than reactively, is to mistake possibilities for probabilities.

And knowing when not to trade is as important as knowing what trades are probably worth making.