Can anyone reflect on taking college psychology or behavioral finance for trading?

[stefan_777]

Quote from Cutten:

I disagree. I can't think of any traders I have met or read about who were *too* sceptical about their market assumptions. No one ever lost money by doubting and testing their assumptions too much.

No one ever lost money if they fully believed Hume, because they would be too skeptical to even pull the trigger, since predictions are dependent on unnecessary assumptions, which are only habitual conventions of belief that have no grounding in reality according to Hume. If one believed Hume, there wouldn't be any human agency (will) capable of making decisions, because if all we have is our perceptions (according to Hume) and even our ideas can be reduced to our perceptions, since perceptions cannot act or make decisions for us, we could not possibly have the free will to press buttons and make trading decisions. This is the reason why I think empiricism is a useless paradigm for traders, or anybody who rightfully believes they're capable of free will.

Take a look at Descartes Meditations to see the disconnect between perceptions and reality, then check out Hume's Treatise of Human Nature for his arguments against our (apparently speculative and unreliable) notions of causality.
Then read Kant's Prolegomena for the whole tl;dr of it all, and if you want a way out of Hume's skepticism.

 

[stefan_777]

Quote from Cutten:

Hume therefore does not damage scientific thinking at all, since all scientific thinking consists of conditional statements beginning with the phrase "If induction applies, then...".

Hume would say you wouldn't even know if induction could apply to any statement. It would then be foolish to make any scientific claims. I think you're missing his point.

If you accept Hume, you have to accept that people cannot induce with certainty from their perceptions. If we do induce from our perceptions, we're making the fallacy of affirming the consequent.

Hume is picking on what science does all the time, which is affirming the consequent:

Hypothesis ------> Observation
Affirm Observation
__________________
Therefore Hypothesis is correct

This argument is a formal fallacy, but this is precisely scientific induction, which is trying to affirm a hypothesis with various observations (or affirming the consequent in other words). These arguments will always remain imperfect, even though we can strengthen them like any inductive argument, they still remain ultimately uncertain. Hume is just rightfully pointing this fact out, but from the extreme perspective of empirical skepticism.

 

[TraderGreg]

Quote from stefan_777:

No one ever lost money if they fully believed Hume, because they would be too skeptical to even pull the trigger,

I believe that if you are mentally fragile enough to be wholly persuaded and "believe" the entire works of any philosopher, you would have problems trading.

Trading needs a strong, malleable mind that can look at things from several viewpoints, and the wise man in general would never wholly commit himself to ideas that can never have any evidence.

If he did, then he would have to keep his beliefs separate from trading, which every trader should be able to do anyway.

I believe the subjective nature of the philosopher and theory is more important than objective philosophy or its theories.

This will be my last post in this thread.

 

[jack hershey]

Quote from TraderGreg:

Very interesting post and study, Jack. Several traders talk to me about having this feel of inference for the market, and it is something I hope I may some day be able to have as well.

I would like to ask you about what you know or believe to be the nature of inference and its attainment (I especially found the inference through sleeping interesting) if you are willing to share.

I don't believe I can reflect on these psychologies personally, however; I am only familiar with more simple theories and applications.

Thanks for the insight as well.



I agree with you almost completely, Stefan. My point is that I believe philosophy is the pursuit to reason unattainable knowledge, which is logic and understanding at its purest and most noble forms.

The sharing of philosophy should be the sharing and flow of ideas in the sense.

Philosophical arguments serve great purposes in that they add, challenge, and qualify to the wealth of human reasoning, and yet it completely entirely destroys it.

The arguments in philosophy are usually naive, where views are defended for pride and nothing else. People that believe in their faith will scrutinize and pick out some minor detail in a theory to assist in justifying their own beliefs rather than question them. If an argument is not conducted for these reasons, very few actually have a legitimate point, simply because most people are not rational or wise enough to construct one on their own.

In essence, I believe the personal practice of philosophy and collecting philosophical ideas is absolutely beautiful, but the distractions of those who cannot understand nor practice it correctly, as well as those who can do this but succumb to the temptations of human pride and contentiousness and ambition makes the community itself a large pile of shit.

The rational evaluations, qualifications, and refutes of theories serves a good purpose of greater information for future generations, but at the time just creates more nonsense; it is like listening to two people on CNBC having a heated squabble on why this will happen and the next why it won't; there are important tidbits, but both of them are fools and 90% or more of what they say is shit. The wise one sits patiently, collects ideas, and perhaps comes to the conclusion of what is more or less likely with an open mind to being wrong.

The ideal philosopher should never come to a conclusion on the unknown besides to attempt to decide which situations are more or less likely, whilst supporting and refuting all sides of the arguments at all times.

At this point I must admit that I have kind of lost sight of my point and also have the "I feel a lot better now" feeling of contentiousness, so in essence I am no more an ideal philosopher than anyone else, and have plenty of work left to do. This is why I decided not to write philosophy anymore; I don't agree with the structure of the philosophical community, nor am I any different than the rest of them.

I just have individual progress to make.

TraderGreg see attached.

 

[TraderGreg]

Quote from jack hershey:

TraderGreg see attached.

Very intriguing, Jack, and I'm glad I decided to come back. It will take me another read or two to understand everything in the document, but there are a couple very key things I picked up on:

Iterative refinement threads: I have them bookmarked but have not gotten a chance to read them yet, which I would like to begin doing soon

Merging distrust with perception to get insanity: perhaps not to the extent of insanity, but paper trading with losses day after day after day very much eroded my trading mentality (started out on 1 min forex). I had very brief looks of success at times, but my trading actually got worse after a while. Eventually I became terrified and dreaded trading my scheduled times. I eventually imploded, and have since completely restructured my approach, taken time off, and will get back next week (to paper trading, after spending weeks just watching, learning, and internalizing applied rules to market signals)

The feedback loop of cycles of market information: the building of inference here is quite self-explanatory, but I find the importance you put on sleep to be very interesting. Do you think that sleep should be patterned/scheduled/assisted in any way to help internalizing the new information?

Using trading capital for a purpose: I have long thought to create (or maybe there is one somewhere) a thread on what to do with excess wealth, but figured I shouldn't take the time out of my learning when I don't have any yet

Anyway, I plan to use it toward wildlife conservation (simple as buying important/disputed wildlife lands and possibly trying to make more parks, etc.) and possibly working with energy companies to promote alternatives (could be my own pursuits, investing in new firms, etc.). It may not be the problems you are referring to, and I am far from actually making a plan (or getting wealth...), but I would like to support a good cause

 

[slacker]

http://oyc.yale.edu/economics/game-theory/contents/downloads

Yale has a number of first class courses online. Before taking the psy cources I would take this one on Game Theory:

This course is an introduction to game theory and strategic thinking. Ideas such as dominance, backward induction, Nash equilibrium, evolutionary stability, commitment, credibility, asymmetric information, adverse selection, and signaling are discussed and applied to games played in class and to examples drawn from economics, politics, the movies, and elsewhere.

It is free and the lectures are very well done. Much more useful than psychology, for trading or any other business. Psy depends too much on the instructor and focus on the course.

 

[stefan_777]

Quote from TraderGreg:


If he did, then he would have to keep his beliefs separate from trading, which every trader should be able to do anyway.

And there's no better way to do that than become a philosopher.

If I didn't study the stuff, I may actually have picked one philosophy over another. It's usually what I see when people start off learning about it, the tendency is to want to come to conclusions immediately at the first glance.

Don't run away now, you've said philosophy doesn't provide conclusions, then where do I find conclusions?
After what has been said here, the answer to that is pretty grim, unless of course it involves something like 2+2=4. But conclusions relevant to real life? I don't think so.

But sometimes it easier to just go with someone who sounds like they've arrived at a conclusion or the holy grail, especially if they use arcane acronyms.

 

[Albert Cibiades]

Was that a corn "maize", Jack?

 

[David Hume]

Just for the record, I never say "I don't know why I took that trade". I always know exactly why I took it because I have 20 independent but self-consistent purely mechanical and totally numerical systems running simultaneously. Intuition in trading is a load of crap. If you can "intuit" it you can discover what the "intuition" is, create an algorithm for it, and code it.

 

[TraderGreg]

Quote from David Hume:

Just for the record, I never say "I don't know why I took that trade". I always know exactly why I took it because I have 20 independent but self-consistent purely mechanical and totally numerical systems running simultaneously. Intuition in trading is a load of crap. If you can "intuit" it you can discover what the "intuition" is, create an algorithm for it, and code it.

Talk about irony... LOL