I teach trading in order to learn it better. Often, the most valuable insights about how the markets work, and how to best work with them, seem to reflect the principles of sports psychology. I’m not a sports psychologist, however, but I am a competitive tennis player, so I live sports psychology on the weekends.

At team practice on Monday night only 4 of us showed up, so we had a semi-private lesson with Coach Ralph.  I’m a baseliner by nature, but Ralph had me up at the net practicing volleys while my team mates were hitting the ball as hard as they could.

 

I thought to myself, “I don’t belong at the net. I can win my points from the baseline; so why should I subject myself to this?” I was uncomfortable and trying not to show it. Why was I uptight? 

 

Well, for one thing, a tennis court is 78 feet long, so hitting a proper volley from inside the service line with the ball traveling at 90 mph (132 ft./sec) means one has about 450 milliseconds to read and react to the ball. To put that in context, it takes about 300 milliseconds to blink your eye. So, if you blink, you miss the volley. And I was missing a lot of them.

 

But I wasn’t blinking, I was doing something else equally problematic.

 

Coach Ralph pointed out that I was anticipating the ball. Of course I was. With only 500 milliseconds to react, I felt I needed to figure out where that ball was likely to go before it was even hit. I was right about half the time, but the other half of the time I was off balance and that caused my errors. Making errors on half my volleys would cost me dearly in an actual match because a savvy opponent would constantly try to draw me in.

 

The solution, said Coach Ralph, was to stop thinking, which meant stop anticipating, and simply be ready to react will 100% commitment and intensity the moment I saw the ball leave my opponent’s racquet.

 

I think you can deduce the parallels to trading. The market is constantly trying to make us guess what it’s about to do next. That’s a trap. Your only job is to have a way to exploit the move the market actually makes, in a timely and confident manner.

 

For more free advice about the psychology of trading from a coach who actually trades, visit here.