How Tiger Woods plays golf (from Wikipedia)

It saturday and I just checked the pool and walked under my clubs stored above the causeway to the pool.

The thread caught my attention as a consequence of this.

I love playing golf and it has been a family pastime most of my life. I have been a fan of Tiger's since he came on the scene. It is fun to see his face on billboards all over the world.


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Quote from Wikipedia:While he is considered one of the most charismatic figures in golf's history, Woods' approach is, at its core, cautious. He aims for consistency. Although he is better than any other Tour player when he is in top form, his dominance comes not from regularly posting extremely low rounds, but instead from avoiding bad rounds. To illustrate, the standard deviations of Woods' 18-hole scores are typically lower than those of most Tour players. Woods plays fewer tournaments than most professionals (15–21 per year, compared to the typical 25–30), and focuses his efforts on preparing for (and peaking at) the Majors and the most prestigious of the other tournaments.
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I don't agree with the author's assessment of Tiger. Nor do I agree with the way he relates it to trading.

I tried to consider which tour golfers fir the cautious category. Tiger certainly doesn't make the list.

As for trading, caution isn't part of my picture either. Why would caution come into the trading picture? How does a trader exercise caution and how does a golfer for that matter?

When Tiger plays, what I see hime doing is his absolute best on every shot and I admire how when he arrives at the ball, the next shot is all that matters and he is going to alwys take his best shot. Caution is not in the picture.

Consistency comes up for some kinds of traders. It is apparently something that stems from setting goals or some such. Pencil sharpening may involve consistency but I do not see it as a golfing or trading intentionality. It is more of a stat or what results from some more defined initiatives or intentions. consistency is consequential.

Tiger is an example of the NIKE slogan. He is an example of the Accenture slogan: High Performance, Delivered.

This is not avoiding bad rounds. Tiger is the "complete" golfer that came from purposefully working to ecell all the time and under any conditions.

That is how Tiger relates to trading. Being involved before during and after trading and purposefully drilling on the essence of the opportunity.

Tiger plays to both do better than anyone else and to play the course in the best possible way considering every place his ball arrives at no matter the conditions.

Excellence in trading has the same measure as golf: the bottom line. Traders do not have to pick their trading events. Neither does Tiger. Tiger plays when he wants and continually builds a record of unequalled excellence. He divides his time according to his pursuits and interests.

Trading and tournament earnings can't be compared for champs in the field. The author didn't understand this.

For capital there is no tournament on - off switch. The trading is a continuous tournament where the goal is capital extraction.

Tiger extracts what he wishes or wants. Traders optimize through effectiveness and efficiency. Traders do reach Tiger's level of acquisition and they do participate in a lot of ways with their acquisitions and their reputations and those kinds of consequences that come from such reputations.

Enough is enough in both fields. It is possible for traders to sideline in favor of other inteests. Usually, though, havingcontinuity with the market's progress is weighed quite heavily by traders. They are not slaves after a while but they are very inclined to hang in there on the way up to the plateaux of excellence in an assortment of markets.

Making 10 to 20 million is a level of activity. So is making 30 to 40 million. The posts are here in ET. making above 60 million thins the crowd in golf as well as trading. After that it is more a case of the enterprises and how they function. The financial industry has many big enterprises and their operators distinguish themselves and usually move on out after a while to doing what they feel like and not being tied to the whipping post any longer.

Golf per se does not make golf. But Money does make money. Here is where Tiger and traders merge and follow similar paths. Once you have it and have a lot, other people take care of the store and the money vlocity is off the table.

Tiger and the trader are peas in a pod when you look at the transitional aspect of their lives and performance. The ramping up to excellence comes from the same mold. The tooling. health, mental and physical. The drilling. The prep. The debriefing. The guidance and the help. Everything has a purpose and is purpoesful.

Golf and trading have other killer similarites. No one ever gets by by kidding themselves. No one ever gets there with out doing the work. Reading books doesn't make golf or trading work. Their is no competition in either. Tiger is not competing with others; he is making a path of excellence that no one has matched as yet. He is different and unique. He is the best.

The trader isn't competing either. He is seeing the elephant and extracting what is there to be had. It's there; he takes it. He works to optimize by being effective and efficient all the time. he is playing all the time and he is taking what is there all of the time.

Skip the consistency, caution and avoiding mistakes.

Enough is enough comes later.
 
Quote from pairsarb:
Your statement that Tiger IS the PGA tour is somewhat hyperbole.
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You're right that it's a bit of an overstatement, but try asking Jack Vickers what he thinks - you'll likely get an earful. Also try asking the TV execs what they know about a Tiger week vs. a non-Tiger week.

I think Pistol Pete is a much better example of the kind of thing you're talking about.

I just don't believe that Tiger gives a shit about his total wins stat. He has only one focus at this point. Like Pete, he might have some interest in retaining his World #1, if only for the reason that he knows his sponsorship deals will be better. In a recent interview, he said that his main focus outside of golf is to 'make sure his family is provided for'. Hard to believe, but that's what he said.
 
Granted. I actually don't know what tiger actually thinks...I can't find the data. Pete, yes, he said it, and it appears he followed through with it either as a plan or said it in hindsight.

Maybe the analogy would be better if we had trading touraments. Where traders have one day, for example, in the US markets to out earn each other, in some regulated event. No, that wouldn't happen probably, but its the only way to say what some athletes do transfers to trading.

My perspective it this: I was an athlete, now I trade. I see similarities every single day. Nothing I have done compares as much to playing tennis in high level competition as much as trading does. And yes, I haven't done too many things. But I have done a few at a very high level.

I would say, and I say that the #1 thing that top pros have in tennis is consistency over the bottom pros. It is actually a statistic on the shot For the top ten, its an average of 1 more shot per rally than the 50-100 players. Yes every pro has his weapons, but they are nothing without consistency. In that, I believe trading is exactly the same.

Even bad tennis is similar to bad trading. Going for too much in a point (trying to hit winners) is analogous to too much size, not taking profits, losing focus. I guess I could go on and on. I can...but it would be my own mental self-flagellation. I happen to love trading....so I draw on whatever I can to push my success (enjoyment, skill, money) to newer higher levels.

Maybe its so fascinating to me because I appreciate these similarities. I derive the same pleasurable feelings and challenges. And the most important thing is that its true for me, and it seems to work.
 
Quote from traderNik:



Tiger IS the PGA Tour.
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Imo this is overstated.

Guys love golf. Look at all the pro basketball, football and baseball players that spend their time out on the links. Isn't it kind of strange seeing so many guys from "the hood" out there in the fairways hitting a little white ball?

There will always be heroes of the game, but they don't make or break a sport that so many of us guys are passionate about.

There are some things that imo will never die regardless of who their leaders are: poker, chess, golf, blackjack, etc. We can't help ourselves...
 
Quote from jack hershey:

....Skip the consistency, caution and avoiding mistakes.

Enough is enough comes later.
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Wow - another post to refine big picture beliefs, and save, Jack.
 
You're completely correct.

Heck, in any given year the major's themselves offer an extreme diversity of courses and conditions.

As a footnote: How I Play Golf should be on most traders reading list.
Quote from traderNik:

I appreciate the point you're trying to make (pick your spots and play to your optimal skill set, which is great advice) but I do not for a second believe that Tiger's game is somehow 'more suited' to one course or another. His game is the most complete in history. Its only weakness is his driver and he could hit 3-wood off the tee on all 18 holes and clean any field on any course.

Tiger's schedule is dictated by his other committments, his international playing committments, and his focus on majors.

Tiger IS the PGA Tour. It wouldn't surprise me if he was sick of making millionaires out of so many PGA Tour bureaucrats. Tiger does not need the PGA Tour. They need him. He sits out the lesser tournaments because he can.

To sum it up, I agree with everything you said, except the idea that Tiger is an example of an athlete (or trader or whatever) that takes this approach.
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Don't follow golf that closely, but this angle of calculating the golfers s.d. is interesting and one that I hadn't heard used before. His conclusion seems reasonable.
If Woods has a complete game and can run any course, it would follow that he would have more low scores to go with his average scores. The fact that he does not, at least according to the article, certainly suggests caution.
 
Quote from stock_trad3r:

Thats assuming you can teach someone to trade stocks or that you can learn how to trade stocks profitably.

EMT says you can't
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you are a f-ing idiot.

1. What does your post have to do with what the originator of the thread was trying to demonstrate?

2. EMH (not emt...the "h" is for hypothesis) was a silly hypothesis created by someone in school that had never traded or worked in the amrkets in any capacity.. EMH assume that all players have the same percetion of information, and that everyone has complete information; and all use and process said information with the same conclusion...which is OBVIOSLY wrong.

3. I have found that without excetion, anyone that quotes or even tries to bring up EMh has zero market experice. I have never found anyone on the street that gives it any merit whatsoever. I will direct that level of sophistication to you as well.
 
Quote from fhl:

Don't follow golf that closely, but this angle of calculating the golfers s.d. is interesting and one that I hadn't heard used before. His conclusion seems reasonable.
If Woods has a complete game and can run any course, it would follow that he would have more low scores to go with his average scores. The fact that he does not, at least according to the article, certainly suggests caution.
More...

It suggests how great an impact is of a single error in an otherwise very high performance.

I had a shot at Ventana where the grounds keeper returned my club to me (I lost my grip) and the drive went over the green. Fortunately, they placed a boulder in the rattlesnake infested cactus and the ball bounced off the boulder in a very high arc that let it come to rest within 15 inches of the cup. I was able to get par with a two put. My handicap was unaffected.

I wolud have been very cautions about that shot (after the shot only) because of snakes. I stumbled when I stopped my turn about to get a provisional ball; I tightened two spikes on my forward foot and got three additional birdies on long holes later in the game, all largely as a result of having tight spikes from that point on. You can't be too cautious when it comes to compensating for golf cart vibrations on unpaved desert paths. Granite decay is the issue here.
 
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