Most professional athletes these days have biological passports. I submit to you that investors should apply the same principle to their own trading.
A biological passport is an individual’s electronic record which profiles his or her personal genetic biological markers. The premise being that rather than testing for and identifying new illegal drugs, violations can be detected by simply noting variances from an athlete’s established normal biological profile.
To paraphrase Ross Perot, “Sports has rules, war has rules, investing has rules.” My suggestion to you is that as traders, we need a similar paradigm to detect and expose prohibited behavior. Investors, it’s time for a ‘selfie’!
The merits and benefits of devising your own investor’s biological passport can literally become the passport to profits you seek. In my Tensile Trading approach to investing, the last of the ten stages deals with revisiting all your trades and seeking clues as how best to improve your performance. I’ve written nearly two dozen blogs on the leverage of reviewing your investing history in your trading journal and searching out these lessons. Here are links to four of those blogs:
https://stockcharts.com/articles/journal/2014/01/tell-us-all-you-know-about-investing.html
https://stockcharts.com/articles/journal/2012/08/my-pal-warren-on-the-10-stages-of-investing.html
https://stockcharts.com/articles/journal/2012/10/the-secrets-i-learned-from-jesse-livermore.html
It’s one thing to assemble a bucket list of personal trading rules. What I am suggesting here is actually building an ideal version of your trading self. One that embodies all you have done well in the past and that identifies and purges all your past trading mistakes. In other words, create a biological vision of yourself as the investor you want to be – the investor you know you can become. Then give this biological self a name. This becomes your alter ego – the model investor – you relate to and aspire to be.
My alter ego is named “Jesse”. I strive to be Jesse and thereby avoid the tyranny of my own bad trading behaviors as a result. When the market gets ugly or tense, I endeavor to stay focused, stick to my plan and not deviate from the biological self role model I’ve built as “Jesse”.
It’s all about emulating Jesse and asking myself, “what would Jesse do?” as I endeavor to untangle the anxieties of executing my trades. Jesse is unwavering, logical, rational and always in harmony with the market. He is endowed with all my successful trades and purged of all my impulsive, stupid, money losing ones. Jesse is my alter ego, but he is also my biological self. We endeavor to be as one and the same during market hours.
Precisely as prohibited doping violations can now be detected as variances from an athlete’s biological passport, so too can prohibited trading violations be detected from Jesse’s biological trading profile. By continually endowing your biological alter ego with lessons from all your successful trades and then basing your own investing and trading upon the psychological stability of his profile, the advantages of keeping up your trading journal will become clear. Because Jesse is endowed with every one of my trading experiences, he continues to improve as an investor with every passing year!
All I ask is to give this approach a try for three months before you bombard me with emails and comments calling me bizarre. By then, you’ll appreciate that it really does work.
Trade well; trade with discipline!
-- Gatis Roze
P.S. Click HERE for information on my future appearances & seminars.
October 17th, 2015- ASSET ALLOCATION WORKSHOP with Gatis Roze & Chip Anderson.
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