Power of Speed and Focus

I value the speed of thinking a lot. It is extremely important to short term traders. In the meantime, it can also substantially improve efficiency of swing traders.

Market is not a place for fun. If you are looking for excitement, go to Las Vegas.
At least you get free drinks there. Market is a place full of wolfs and alligators, as an excellent trader said in the Chinese trading forum www.trader1688.com.

Over the years, I accumulated experience on short term trading, especially intraday, through a lot of trial and error. I learned to appreciate how speed can affect trading performance.

I will just talk about speed of monitoring market and absorbing market information. Thanks to the modern technologies, now we have too much access to too much data, news, charts. I am not talking about over- analyzing market and get buries in excessive flow of information. Market sometime is simple, but it is never easy. The moment you step into market, you are competing against market makers, institutions with superior info access and exchange access, and those evil trading robots. So don't pretend you are the smartest ass out there in the universe. Market is a good place to find out all your weakness.

Ok, where am I? Right...  Speed of monitoring market.  How good are you on analyzing the main themes of market?

At any given moment, time yourself as if you are the reporter of cnbc. How many minutes you need to find out what is going on in the market, forex, bond, commodities, indexes, major sectors. Which groups are leading, which groups are lagging, sentiment, market breadth, technical indicators and support resistance levels, volume,  what news are happening ... Try to cut that time down in any way you can. Use your workflow to simply it. Learn to filter out noise. Write tools to do it. I designed my own tools to monitor the market and target to see major moves within 60 seconds.  And try to make decisions within 5 minutes if not shorter. Don't get me wrong. I am not talking about overtrading here.  If you speed up the ability to analyzing information, it frees up your mind and reduce stress. Clock runs slower.

Today's market is a good example. When ES was making new high at 1203 and NQ was outperforming, between 11.10am and 11.20am i think, some subtle signal was detected. I was basically reading through market sectors every 60 seconds, 10 times nonstop.  I was looking at the sentiment, volume, leaders, laggards, non-stop. Could it be noise? Yes. 80% of time. But it was alarming.  I slowly added my shorts on index future and stocks. Fading at top and monitoring closely... I was not sure. I set up more limit orders (which was never really filled later).

I know there will be speculators challenging my way. But to me, market is a place of unlimited risk if you don't manage well.  Only by speeding up your brain, you can free yourself to execute better.

How we can get there?

First, I hold the belief that talent is 20% born, and 80% trained. More than three decades of academic research showed that a focus on effort, not on intelligence or ability, is key to raising successful kids. After all, raising successful kids are as hard as raising good traders. There are two types of learners, fixed mindset type versus mastery-oriented mindset. The mastery-oriented people think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work.

Second, we need a systematic way of training. An easy method my son's piano teacher taught him is to break down the learning into small pieces.  Play two measures and repeat many times. Master it before you move on.  Professional sports players all do this. The best tennis school in Russia, which produced Safin brother&sister and other outstanding players, don't take kids to competition until years of training. All they do is precise and deep training on basics. You get my point...

Third, grade performance based on the right criteria. Not just money, but on how well you stick to your training plan. I had written "we all need a glorious day" to talk about this. It is about hard work and well-planned practice.

I have always admired great sports players like Federer, Jordan, and Beckenham, ... The list goes on. Federer plays with so much speed, force, and precision. And this Beckenham, man, almost every single time, when needed, he could send the soccer ball into the corner and then gave false hope to England fans. ( I admit that I have some resentment toward him, mainly because my wife still thinks he is cuter than me.)

The superior performance did not come from nowhere. They spent a decade in the training for those moments.

The title of this blog is power of speed. But I am talking about power of focus and effort now. So, enough is enough.  Hope you get what I mean. And I meant well, my friends.