The trader’s decision-making process is one of the most important concepts in trading for me. Why? Your results depend on it.
Generally, it is all the thinking and analytical processes and the decisions you make based on them, starting from the initial analysis (“idea”) up to the closing and analysing of a trade. In other words, the entire thought process that goes on in your head.
The same principles were already obvious in application to traders. What’s more, the best traders have specific elements of their decision-making process that are virtually absent in other traders.
Let’s break down your decision-making process into elements.
1. It starts with market analysis and instrument selection (specific stocks, specific currencies from the available pool - for example) .
What factors drive your choice, why did you choose this instrument and not another?
Here we have the first decisions. Now, on what basis do you make them?
This is important because if you start to think about how to improve your decision-making process in order to get better results, you will realize that… maybe you can choose better.
Let me tell you how the best traders do it: the best traders learn to choose the best entries from those that are available to them. In the sense that if they specialize in a sector of companies, they choose the shorts or longs with the best prospects for profits.
The best traders try to pick the best of the many opportunities that are available to them.
What does that mean for you?
It means that it is possible and even worthwhile to work on the criteria of selecting the instrument on which it will be the easiest and on which we will make the most (potentially) money.
The criteria may be different for different traders, but the idea is the same: you can choose the instrument, the market situation that is best for you.
In the case of AI systems, their development will initially go in this direction: searching for the best opportunities from what is available. It will take, for example, 0.5 seconds to search five thousand companies in this respect. And out of this enormity it will choose e.g. 100 for further analysis and trade.
I mention AI to begin to slowly realize what kind of analytical and decision-making power we will have to deal with in just a few years.
But let’s go back to the decision-making process.
2. We have selected the pools of best companies, what next?
Let’s assume that we want to open a trade as long as the criteria are right. And here is another question: where, among the selected are the best opportunities?
A simple example: we want to go long on companies with good fundamentals. Our selection factor at this stage of the decision-making process will be (for example) volume behavior. We want to go into such movements, where the volume is clearly increasing - which suggests that the interest of buyers is growing. At this stage we will rank our companies according to the best situations of increasing volume. Somewhere it is too low, somewhere it is too high and the price is not growing much (which can be suspicious, because it means that someone is buying a lot and someone else is selling, if in a good technical situation someone is selling it cannot be a beginner, it is rather a professional, which can mean that they know more than us and get rid of the stock).
At this stage we have a few companies with the best situation.
Here we used volume, but we can analyze more elements: candlestick patterns, Fibonacci levels, MACD, CCI and thousands of other indicators. How about using the confluence of indicators and situations? For example, the price reaches the average 200 from the top, is close to resistance and at the Fibonacci level of 62%. Here you meet several things at once that other traders are looking at.
I want to emphasize that at this stage of the decision-making process we also have several options to choose from. Let’s ask ourselves which indicators are best for our purposes? It may not be the volume, but for example the relation between the Bid and Ask order volume. The Bid is falling - the number of sellers is decreasing, which may mean that the market is slowing down. After a while the expected situation occurs - Bid orders appear, large orders.
I have seen situations where traders enter both the expiring Bid (upcoming ASKs are a signal to confirm the positions, if there are no ASKs the trader runs away from the position) and the upcoming large Ask orders.
To sum up: we can choose the best market situation according to many indicators, many criteria.
3. Now it is time to decide how much capital we will allocate to which market.
Summarize the important points:
The decision-making process is a series of analyses and decisions. Each distinct element of the decision-making process can be improved, approached from different angles, analyzed and refined according to different criteria. This gives you the ability to improve results - improving one by one each element on which those results depend.
A recipe for performance improvement:
- Break down the way you make decisions into elements.
- Learn as much as you can about how you can improve each of them.
Of course, there’s more, but I don’t want to write too much here, so it’s worth leaving traders with this interesting idea - pointing out the process that will improve their results.
Someday I’ll write more about the stages and best practices that can be used there. And about the fact that the psyche plays a huge role in this process.
–
PS. Thank you for your questions in previous posts. We collect them and will answer in a while.