When I left graduate school to become a trader it was 1994 and there were a goodly handful of books specifically about trading psychology and a few more specifically about expert traders. I, as many new traders, couldn't get enough of this stuff. I would even sometimes just skip the Chicago social scene and go home to read - on a Friday night! I was definitely hooked.

Today however many of those classic ideas about trading psychology have proven to be out-of-synch with what we have learned about how the brain handles uncertainty. The human literally can't just trade the probabilities because whether one is conscious of it or not, your brain recognizes and reacts to fundamental uncertainty by creating a contextual assessment and a subsequent judgment call.

This is essentially a neurological fact. You are always going to be making judgment calls - no matter how much you try to plan not to. Furthermore, this reality dictates that you should adopt a whole different strategy and work on making better judgment calls - not necessarily better specific trade plans.

Does the difference make sense?

Anything you can do to improve your judgment - practice, breaks, sleep, "making complex decisions non-deliberately" - will improve the calls you make. In practice, this means that much of that effort you put into studying the market needs to be redirected towards understanding your perceptions and typical reactions that underlie your judgments.

You become the higher probability.

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