MICHEL PIREU: Know thyself is the first commandment in successful trading
Your personality and investor type are unconscious drivers in intuitive decision making
“This is no science. It is an art,” wrote Adam Smith in The Money Game. “Now we have computers and all sorts of statistics, but the market is still the same and understanding the market is still no easier. It is personal intuition, sensing patterns of behaviour. It’s a kind of locked-in concentration, a feel, nothing that can be schooled. “The first thing you have to know is yourself. If you are not automatically applying a mechanical formula then you are operating in this area of intuition, and if you are going to operate with intuition — or judgment — then it follows that the first thing you have to know is yourself. You are — face it — a bunch of emotions, prejudices and twitches, and this is all very well as long as you know it. “Successful speculators do not necessarily have a complete portrait of themselves, warts and all, in their own minds, but they do have the ability to stop abruptly when their own intuition and what is happening ‘out there’ are suddenly out of kilter. A c...
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