If you get a series of agitated replies with a bunch of rebuttals you can easily bat away, you are probably onto a good trade idea. The forecasting business has very little accountability and is mostly about marketing and sounding smart, not accuracy. The tricky thing with market probabilities is that unlike probabilities in gambling, they are not known or measurable. You define how much risk you should be taking for a given scenario and the trick is to just be a robot and follow system you've designed, regardless of what you feel internally. If something like that happened to me now I’d know that’s a regime change and update how and what I’m trading.

His writing style is engaging, approachable and entertaining and he has the experience and knowledge of a veteran professional trader. For example, I want to highlight grit and self-control as critical facets under the heading of conscientiousness, because those are important in trading. One of the great contradictions of trading is that conservative, disciplined people tend to be risk-averse while risk-loving people tend to be compulsive and undisciplined.

IQ is a controversial topic in the world of psychology, and there is heated debate over what exactly it measures. My highest conviction trades generally have multiple inputs, but they always start with fundamentals or microstructure and then get refined, streamlined (or filtered out) by other factors. There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is also the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time.

Read the book: “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength”, by Roy Baumeister and John Tierney. You need a significant edge to not only make money, but also to make enough money to exceed execution, technology, and operational costs. You had a nice anecdote in the book about a guy using post-it notes to keep himself on the right track. If you think that each narrative is on something like a wave, and you know where we are on each wave, you can try to spot changing points. My experience with over-bought and oversold indicators is that your threshold for putting on trades should be as extreme as possible.Don’t get caught up in the CNBC (bullish) or Twitter (bearish) hype or get sucked in by what the “smart guy at the big hedge fund” wrote in his opinion piece in the FT.