In the nineties, when I was President of Rand Financial Services, I periodically visited London to meet with our larger London-based customers.
On one such trip, I made an appointment to meet our contact at a large proprietary trading company.
The offices of the trading company were located in a new glass office tower across from Hyde Park, near Hyde Park Corner and Green Park.
When I entered the office, I was taken by the incredible view of Green Park.The floor-to-ceiling windows on one side of the office looked down on Green Park from just above the tree tops.It is a beautiful park and seeing it from that vantage point was breathtaking.
Other than the incredible view, the offices looked like any well-appointed trading room, anywhere in the world.It had about twenty-five trading desks all manned by serious, fit-looking young traders.
As my contact showed me the office, he asked if I would like to meet the greatest trader in the world.
The greatest trader in the world?
I have been privileged to know several futures traders who could, in fact, be among the greatest traders in the world.
After all, I was President of Rand, a company owned by the fund managed by Monroe Trout.Bill Dunn is a close friend and, when I was on the trading floor, I filled orders for Paul Tudor Jones.
So, of course, I wanted to meet the “greatest trader in the world”.
My contact pointed across the room to a short, somewhat-disheveled older man in shirtsleeves.
All of the other traders in the office were young and fit and the man identified as the greatest trader in the world was neither.
I asked why he thought that this man was the greatest trader in the world.
My contact said that when the man, who owned the trading company, got into a winning position, he pressed the position like no one else in the world.
He went on to tell me about a gold trade that the man made in which the gold market rallied over several months and this trader added and added to the position.He held the position until it had made a dramatic move that must have earned him, according to the description, tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars.
So, that was it?
This man was the greatest trader in the world because he was the best at pressing his advantage.
Of course, that was just the part of this greatest trader’s skill that could be seen, like the tip of an iceberg.
Unseen was what led him to have the market knowledge and supreme confidence to be able to press his advantage to such great effect.
First, it is obvious that he must not only have had extensive trading experience over many years, but, more importantly, he had to have incorporated the lessons learned from his past successes and failures into his trading.
Next, a trader only gets to this world-class level of performance with unfailing discipline. In fact, his discipline must have transcended from conscious discipline to unconscious discipline.
Then, he must be constantly evolving in his trading, just as the market evolves.In order to evolve in this manner, he needed to embrace positive change.
Lastly, and less obviously, he needed to be in Vibrational Alignment in order to be able to allow the power of his intuition to freely come forward in his thinking so that he could uninhibitedly make bold, yet rational, trading decisions.
In reality, he had a world-class mastery of what we call in Transformative Trading –
- He learned from his past successes and failures.
- He had moved to unconscious discipline;
- He embraced positive change; and
- He had found Vibrational Alignment.
He was not the greatest trader in the world because he had discovered some unique setup or some series of chart patterns that made him money. He was the greatest trader in the world because he had first mastered the Four Pillars of Transformation®.
He had the knowledge, the control, the flexibility and the intuition to be able to press his advantage to world-class effect.
Jeff Quinto www.ElectronicFuturesTrader.com Telephone: +1-312-685-5333 Email: Jeff@ElectronicFuturesTrader.comListen to my Electronic Trader with Jeff Quinto podcast at ElectronicFuturesTrader.com or on iTunes by searching for The Electronic Trader with Jeff Quinto on the iTunes store.
Derivative transactions, including futures, are complex and carry a high degree of risk. They are intended for sophisticated investors and are not suitable for everyone. Transformative Trading is educational in nature and does not provide brokerage services or make investment recommendations.
Copyright © 2008 by Jeff Quinto, all rights reserved
