Jason Williams - Mental Edge in Trading

THE

MENTAL

EDGE IN TRADING

Adapt Your Personality Traits
and Control Your Emotions
to Make Smarter Investments

JASON WILLIAMS, MD

with Foreword and Commentary by
LARRY WILLIAMS

Copyright 2013 by Jason Williams. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a data base or retrieval system, without prior written permission of the publisher.

e-ISBN: 978-0-07-179941-6

e-MHID: 0-07-179941-9

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As parents we like to think that our children will learn lifes lessons from us. We dont often think we learn much from them; weve been there, done that. Our purpose is to break the ice, to show them the way. This book, by my son Dr. Jason Williams, turns that notion upside down for me.

While I have been trading the markets for some 50 years now, in this book I learned from my son. The child was the teacher. The first thing I learned is that in order to change taking incorrect action and not changing detrimental habits, we really do need to know ourselves.

Without knowing yourself, how can change occur?

I kind of thought I knew most of the things about the market as well as my own personality as a trader. I was flat out wrong. When I took the personality profile test that Jason gave me, I immediately learned my strengths and weaknesses. What surprised me was that I had never realized any of these points before.

I always knew I could develop great mechanical trading systems, but could never figure out why I had such a hard time trading or following them myself. My best trading has almost always come from a much more freestyle form of trading, something that cant be bottled up or reduced to a single mathematical formula. It was not until I took the personality test that I understood why I can develop good systems but simply had problems following them.

What I found was that the shoe didnt fit. While intellectually I can develop systems, my personality is not one to follow them. That was a real breakthrough for me as it crystallized the best possible trading strategy for me. I was able to find the shoe that fits. That realization, as to how I function as a trader, also taught me how I can best use mechanical trading systems. This was a double win for me; I learned my best personal trading strategy as well as how to best use trading systems!

When they were shown to me, that was very much an A-ha! experience. I instinctively and intuitively knew those were the areas that made me a good trader as well as the areas I needed to work on.

Risk has never bothered me, so I have not been afraid to take trades. The test confirmed that. What I didnt know was that my largest trading weaknesses have been my lack of paying attention to detail. Clearly Im not the worlds best detail person, not even close, but I never realized until reading Jasons work and understanding my personality how much of a hindrance that was to making my trading even more successful.