 Welcome back to the Trade Hacker Mindset. In this episode, I want to talk to you about the six qualities of elite traders. Trading the markets can be difficult to master and seemingly just out of reach. Professional traders have a secret. Trading requires total mental and emotional control. It requires the Trade Hacker Mindset. All right, so let's jump into today's episode and talk about the six qualities of elite traders. So I came across this topic of an interview with Dr. Brett Steenbarger, who is a pretty well-known trading psychologist. And he did some research or his team did some research and compiled a bunch of data. And this was from firms, from trading firms, portfolio management firms, hedge funds, all kinds of investment management firms. And it was really designed to help them a couple different ways. Number one, in their hiring process. So what six qualities were they looking for to hire the best, most talented, the most potential for success as a trader by these trading firms and hedge funds and different investment management firms? The other thing that it was used for was the training of these new traders. So after they actually hired somebody, they found a good candidate, they bring them in. Now they also use this research to help train these new traders, to train them on the strengths of what was needed to become successful. And it had to do with these six qualities of elite traders that we'll jump into. All right, so what are they? Number one is the capacity for sustained focus. So I don't think that's any surprise that if you are going to be a successful trader, you have to have an ability to focus. If you're all over the board, if you're always jumping from thing to thing, if you're always jumping from strategy to strategy and indicator to indicator, we all know, and we probably all went through this at one point in our trading journey, that that is not the way to consistent profits. The other thing is when it comes to a capacity for sustained focus is, he talked about there's a couple of different types of thinkers. Number one is what he referred to as a fast thinker. Okay, so this is somebody who can make decisive decisions very quickly. And then on the other side of that was what he called a deep thinker. Okay, so there's fast thinkers and there's deep thinkers. And what he said was there's a very minimal number of folks who are both. So a lot of people either lean to being quick, decisive, fast thinkers, or someone who was more of a, had to really analyze things and had to be really well thought out. But in either case, both of those take some pretty extreme focus. Okay, and I'm going to touch on that. I'm going to come back to that and touch on that here in a little bit as well. Number two, originality and creativity was the second quality of an elite trader. Now, what did he mean by that? Well, if you think about the average trader, now the average trader is inconsistent, right? And the average trader just does what everybody else does. Okay, but an elite trader, somebody who has a quality of an elite trader, is somebody who's more original, more creative. They do things differently. Or, we all have access to the same information, right? We all have access to the same technology. So it's somebody that looks at the exact same information, but digests it and perceives that information differently. And this really hit home for me because I'm always telling our members that you will never be successful just copying someone else's trades, okay? You will never be successful when we just put out alerts, if you just copy our trades, okay? I'm telling you that because these are members who are most successful are the ones who actually learn how to trade those strategies, okay? We are trying to teach you these strategies. One of the ways that we teach is by letting you look over our shoulder with the alerts to show you how and why and when we place specific trades. But that does not supplement the fact that you have to actually learn the ins and outs of that specific strategy. You have to learn to know when to place that trade, what environment. You have to learn how to place that trade. You have to understand the mechanics of which strikes to choose if we're trading option spreads, for example. And you have to understand why we're placing that trade. It's not enough just to say, well, he knows what he's doing, so I'm just going to copy his trade. That's not enough. No one has ever become a consistently successful trader by copying someone else's trades. You have to learn. And what I've found over the years is that our members who are the most successful, who become the most successful traders, they take what we do and they make it their own, okay? So you take one of our strategies and maybe use that as kind of a core foundation, but you might tweak and massage little aspects of that to fit your personality, to fit exactly what you are trying to do, to fit your account size, to fit the market environment or whatever else it is. But you have to have a little bit of creativity and a little bit of originality to become an elite trader. You cannot just copy someone else. Number three, now this one might sound like a bit of a contradiction to the previous one, but it's actually not. And the third quality of an elite trader is that they learned from a mentor and other great traders. Okay, so I just got done saying you can't just copy somebody else, but what you do need is to be able to follow and learn from a mentor or learn from somebody who has had success trading. And that's the key. That is what navigation trading is all about. We want to actually teach people. You know, there are so many BS trading services online that will send you alerts and you have no idea what they are and you're just supposed to copy and place those trades. And that's never worked. And so, you know, some of our members, you know, sometimes I'll get emails or post where somebody's kind of frustrated because maybe it's a little bit more complex than they expected because they actually have to put the effort forth. They actually have to learn it, but that's what we are all about. We are all about teaching people how to trade and helping you become self-sustainable when it comes to trading. You know, a lot of these other services, they are built and they grow their members because they leave their members in the dark on some of the most important aspects of the trade. So they feed them just enough to keep them on board so that they can keep continually extracting that monthly membership fee or that new course or that upgraded whatever it is. That is not what we do. We want to give you all the information that we can to help you actually learn how to trade and we help guide you and do a lot of the research and testing to help guide you and really optimize these strategies to make you the best successful trader you can be, but it's not about copying, it's about learning how to trade. And if you think about this, you know, this is not just true in trading, right? I mean, every elite athlete has a coach. Every elite professional has a mentor or a coach. You know, I don't care if you're at the top of your game in your profession. You know, I mean, Michael Jordan always had a coach. The top golfers in the world, they have multiple coaches. The top tennis players, they have multiple coaches that mentor and coach them every step of the way, even when they are at the very, very top of their game. Or another example, if you think about physicians, you know, somebody, you know, a successful physician, they didn't just watch a couple of videos or read a couple of books on how to do surgery. They had to go through a whole residency program. They had to go through a whole, you know, multiple years of how-tos of watching other professionals, other experts in their area show them how to do it step by step by step and do it by repetition over and over and over before they could actually go out on their own and perform surgery. Trading is no different. Everybody wants to have a shortcut. Everybody wants to get that, you know, that quick hit where they can make money quickly. But once you realize that trading is a skill that has to be learned and repeated and practiced over time, that's when you're eventually going to become successful. All right. So the fourth quality of an elite trader is emotional resilience. Now this is a big one because think about this. When you're a trader, you are going to have losses. Okay. No one in the history of trading has ever won on every single trade. Okay. So you have to be able to be resilient with your emotions and your discipline after taking losses because losses happen all the time. Now, if you think about, you always hear the analogy in football where if you're a cornerback, if you're a defensive back and you get burned for a touchdown, the best cornerbacks in the world basically erase that from their mind and they come back out with a clear slate being able to cover the wide receiver, right? You've heard that before. In trading, I think it's a little bit different. Okay. We don't want to erase the memory of a loss in trading. We actually need to embrace that loss and learn from it. Now, of course, if you're embracing losses, you can't just put on trades to take losses and think that's going to help you. You have to learn from those. And of course, you have to have good risk management so that those losses become insignificant in the overall scheme of your trading system methodology and your occurrences over time. And this is a tough one for most new traders, this emotional resilience because in most areas of our life, any failure that happens is considered a negative thing, right? But in trading, you have to be willing to fail. You have to be willing to lose on trades. You have to know that some of your trades are going to be losses to ultimately be successful over time. All right. Number five, the fifth quality of an elite trader is attention to detail. Okay. Now, there are some trader, really successful traders who have the engineer type mind. The attention to detail and the focus on the minutia and those folks can be successful at trading. On the other hand, you have some people like that who overanalyze and it's analysis paralysis. And they analyze to the point that they never get to the point of actually clicking the button to make a trade because they're overanalyzing. Okay. So you want to think of this as a scale, right? There's a balance to the amount of attention to detail to be a successful trader. One example for me personally is, you know, I do a tremendous amount of trading, right? I trade a lot. And so for me to document every single detail of every single trade in a spreadsheet is like nails on a chalkboard to me, right? I do a very specific amount of analysis of my trades. But if I overanalyze and I'm spending hours and hours each day just on the documentation of each individual trade, that's not fun for me. Okay. So there's got to be a balance. You've got to find that specific balance. But there does have to be a level of attention to detail to be a successful trader. In other words, you can't just have an idea and throw it out there over and over and over again without doing any detailed analysis to figure out, okay, what went wrong? What can I do better? What adjustments? What techniques? What methodologies? What tweaks can I make to this specific strategy? To make it even better. So you do have to have that attention to detail. All right. And number six, the last quality of an elite trader is that you're always working to improve your game. Remember, the markets are always changing. Sometimes the markets are trending. Sometimes the markets are choppy. Sometimes volatility is high. Sometimes volatility is low. Sometimes technology changes, right? I mean, think about this. Trading used to be done on the pit in the pit with handwritten paper notes, okay? Then computers came along and changed all that, okay? If you didn't adapt, you were no longer in the trading game. And as technology gets more and more advanced, we are going to have tools at our disposal that are going to either help or hurt our trading depending on how we adapt it into our own methodology and our own trading style. The other aspect of always working to improve your game and what this podcast is all about is the mindset. And I cannot stress enough the power of focusing on the mental side, the discipline side of trading, the emotional discipline side of your trading. And that's one aspect that I've really been focused on for really the last few years to and it's helped me become more and more successful. But the journey never ends. If you get to a point where you think, oh, I've got my strategy that works great. I'm just, I'm the best of the best at this game. Well, guess what's going to happen? The market is going to slap you. The market is going to come in and let you know that you're not all that. And so you've got to always be working to improve your game, to stay ahead of the curve, to always be learning and making things better because you can always get better in trading. You never reach a level where you are at the top and you can't get any better. You can always get better. All right, so to recap the six qualities of an elite trader. Number one, capacity for sustained focus. Number two, originality and creativity. Number three, you've learned from mentors or great traders. Number four, emotional resilience. Number five, attention to detail. And number six, always working to improve your game. So the question then becomes of these six, or not of these six, but based on this information, based on this data, based on this research of these six qualities of elite traders. The question is, can these traits be learned or are these part of our DNA? And I think we all kind of know the answer to that. To me, at least the answer is heredity is very relevant. Some of us are just born or have grown up in an environment that makes some of these qualities just kind of an innate behavior within us. It's not something that we have to work on. It's just something that we already have in us that makes us be able to perform that specific characteristic very easily with very little effort. But on the other hand, these qualities are also like muscles and muscles can grow from weak to strong by working out. And these traits and these qualities, they can be developed over time. One of the things that Dr. Steenbarger talked about was not only were these qualities used in the hiring process to try to filter out some of the candidates to get to these people who already had some of these six qualities, but they were also used in the training and development of these folks. So if they're training them and they're using these six qualities as kind of their agenda for training the traders, well, they were trying to let them know, okay, here's what it takes. Here's what you have to get better at. These are your strong qualities. These are your weak qualities. How can we build up on our strengths and also build on our weaknesses to become a more well-rounded trader based on these six qualities? So good news. If I went through those six and you said, man, that's just not something I'm good at, the good news is you can get stronger in that area. If I went through a lot of these and you said, man, I'm really strong in one or two of these areas, and that's what you want to focus on to really push your trading to the next level, that's a good thing too. But I think all six really do make sense, and just based on my experience and my trading and working with other traders, I think this is a pretty good list of the qualities. And so I don't really disagree with any of them from a standpoint of what it takes to be an elite trader. And here's the other thing. You can also use these six qualities to help you determine what type of trader you are. You know, when I was a new trader, I would always hear people, well, you got to figure out what type of trader you are. You got to figure out what type of trading style fits your personality. And I was always like, well, how do I know? I just started trading. I'm just trying to make money. How do I know which is the best fit? I have no idea. But if you look at these six qualities and you can kind of help determine where you fit, let me give you an example. Let's say that you understand and you're aware that you are more of a fast thinker than you are a deep thinker. Well, what style of trading is going to be a better fit for you? I would say day trading versus long-term investing. If you're a day trader, you have to make decisive decisions very quickly. You have to be a fast thinker. On the flip side of that, if that's not your thing, if that's not where you're good at, you're probably going to hate day trading. And what we will be a better fit for you would be maybe longer-term swing trades or even a long-term investor. And that would be more along the lines of what he called the deep thinker. Somebody who really wants to dig in and analyze specific situation, understand how certain economic conditions affect other pieces of the market and you want to be more of a deep thinker, you're probably a best fit as a more of a long-term swing trader or a long-term investor. Some of the other qualities I think are a little bit more required. In other words, emotional resilience, for example. You have to have emotional resilience. If you get pissed off every time you have a losing trade, that's going to be a problem because not only is it going to just affect you emotionally and other aspects of your life, but it's also going to keep you back from having a clear mind to make clear decisions in your other trades. If you have, I talked about in a recent episode, if you're holding on to a losing position, that's going to cloud your judgment for other trades that you need to be making. And so I think emotional resilience is one that if you don't feel like you have that, that's one that you really need to work on. But it really all comes down to self-awareness. Going through these six characteristics or these six qualities of an elite trader and being self-aware is the first step of, is this a strength of mine or is this a weakness? If it's a strength, that's great. I can build on that and make it even stronger. If it's a weakness, I need to be aware of that so that when I do get in a trade or I'm in the middle of day trading or swing trading or whatever it is, when you're in the heat of battle, that you're self-aware enough to understand, oh, I just did that and I know that's a weakness, but you can self-correct because now you're self-aware. And when I'm trying to develop a skill, when I'm trying to be aware of one of my weaknesses, one of the things that I do all the time is I write it down. I write it down. I keep it on a sticky note. I stick it to my monitor. I stick it to my computer so that it's front of mind because if you just being aware of it isn't enough, if you have to be aware of it in action when you're actually trading. And so I would encourage you, if you're going through these and a couple of these are real weaknesses of yours, write them down, put them on a sticky note, stick them on your computer so that as you are actually placing trades, it's front and center and you understand exactly what's going on in your mind, in your thinking, in your perception of that trade while you're doing it, not just after the fact. So I hope this was helpful. If you enjoyed this lesson, I would love to have you go into Apple iTunes or Spotify or wherever you listen to this podcast and rate and review. It really helps us get the word out to more folks. We are here to help. And if you guys have questions, you can always post in our community at community.navigationtrading.com. We look forward to seeing you on the inside and we'll see you in the next episode.