[idaxtrader]

McNab describes a variety of training strategies that thoroughly and competently train ordinary soldiers and bring them to the elite levels of Special Forces troops. The key to such strategies, he emphasizes, is realism. For example, soldiers must be exposed to the sights and sounds of the battlefield or they will become disoriented under actual wartime conditions.Without prior exposure to the intense fighting conditions that they encountered, they froze under pressure. This is highly relevant to trading, where the real-time conditions of risk and reward create their own battlefields. 92

Traders progress from simulating skill modules—entries, risk management, and so on—to placing and managing trades, then trading full days in simulation mode, and eventually putting money on the line with one-lots. Facing—and mastering—challenges time after time creates the battle inoculation that allows traders to keep their cool under the most
pressured circumstances. 92

It is the role of the mentor to ensure that the increasing demands of training build the confidence of performers, rather than defeat them. 92

Your greatest challenge will be to create learning conditions that test you but do not break your spirit. 92

As your own mentor, you provide that competent and confident leadership by creating a steady stream of challenging goals that build upon one another. After struggling with one goal after another and succeeding, you will face the markets with a reservoir of confidence unknown by most market participants. Like the soldiers, you will be battleproofed—the hallmark of true competence. 93

Let’s step back and summarize. When we look at the training of athletes, professional musicians, therapists, physicians, soldiers, and chess players, we see the same three-step progression:
1. Breaking performance into component skills
2. Assembling modules of skills into simple simulations of performance
3. Requiring skill enactment in simulations of gradually increasing complexity


This is why every single elite training program I have been able to find—in sports, chess, health care, and the military—emphasizes progressive skill building through a structured program of practice. 100

Your exercise is to find your frame and just one way of trading it. Keep it simple. Become good at one kind of trade. That will provide you with a foundation for further development. 107


Guided activity in the form of training and mentorship challenges the performer and builds the sense of competence,
sustaining a flow state of high motivation, concentration, and learning. In this state, growth proceeds rapidly. 111

Expertise is skill internalized to the point of habit.116


Ericsson’s research suggests that the concentration of the performer is an essential element in deliberative practice—another factor that distinguishes it from playful experience with a performance field. This means that the duration of effective practice sessions must be limited to allow for rest and recuperation of attention and focus. Naps and rest periods are common among elite performers, reflecting the intensity of activity during practice. In addition to recuperative breaks, the presence of concrete goals and immediate feedback help to keep performers focused on learning during practice sessions. 118

Eventually you could do those things in your sleep. In fact, given the frequent occurrence of hallucinations among sleep-deprived recruits, there’s a sense in which they are doing it in their sleep—which is the whole point. Through repetition, even extreme challenges become automatic. 119

The elite in any field move from competence to expertise by creating performance challenges more demanding than anything they’re likely to experience day to day. We evolve by creating and adapting to challenges that lie outside our comfort zone. 120

These traders have seen so many markets and market scenarios that they develop an anticipatory sense—a
conviction that something is likely to happen because it has happened so many times before. 120

His formula for hitting success was simple: “Get a good pitch to hit.” 122

In a very important sense, when traders develop expertise, the markets they see are different from the markets
everyone else sees. 125

Expert traders similarly chunk information into meaningful groups, aiding their recall and speeding their responses to market events. 126

Rather, experts have accumulated so much implicit learning that they process events more efficiently and effectively than their counterparts. Their training has provided them with new ways of seeing the world based upon the grouping of their perceptions. 126

Novice traders reason in the backward fashion: They look for information to support their opinions rather than assemble their trade ideas from their readings of the market. Expert traders often talk about “letting the market come to me”—another way of saying that the right trades, like the right diagnoses, will emerge from gathering the right data. This is only possible, however, when traders, like physicians, have internalized a kind of decision tree that guides the circular process of collecting information and formulating tentative ideas. 128

Decisive action begins with efficient perception and organized information. 128

Cleeremans and colleagues found that implicit learning is actually an acquisition of knowledge about the statistical structure of events. Williams and Starkes, writing in a completely different field, find that experts possess knowledge about situational probabilities that guide their actions. 130

This accounts for an interesting finding from the research: Not only do expert players make more accurate assessments of ball location, they are also more confident in their assessments than nonexperts. 130

He has learned that, when he sees X, he should do Y. The X-Y linkage, repeated many times across varying conditions, becomes part of his instincts. My explicit processing cannot hope to keep up with such automatic, implicit thinking. 131

This is not merely the will to win, as Bob Knight emphasizes, but the will to prepare to win. 133

Contrary to the advertisements common in the popular media, trading expertise is not a function of possessing a superior indicator, mind-set, or chart pattern. Expert traders process market information differently from nonexperts, cultivating sophisticated mental maps that enable them to eliminate irrelevant information and implicitly process the patterns amidthe market noise. Armed with such maps, expert traders respond more rapidly, confidently, and accurately to market events than do nonexperts. 134

Like Tiger and Nolan, Ted Williams dominated his sport by the consistent application of proper mechanics. 137

Great results come from small improvements that are implemented with consistency. 138