We all like to talk about knowing the probabilities … and then just sticking to them. Most of us like to harangue other traders for not doing so while finding it not so easy to do ourselves.

It isn’t so easy for a number of reasons -

1. Whether you are conscious of it or not, your brain recognizes the ambiguity and uncertainty on your charts.

2. Your own level of beliefs and your confidence in those beliefs (the true “in your gut” feelings that need acknowledged) influences your view of the probabilities. This is more or less what the term “subjective probability” means.

Taleb and now Mr. Elie Aiyache, the author of The Blank Swan – the end of probability, like to say that the whole business of probability and markets is “for philistines”. They are really skipping the reality of how probabilities work inside a brain making a decision under uncertainty. It isn’t that the probabilities are worthless or non-existent, it is gaining a better understanding of how to use them for the tool they are.

When I first found short-term trading, before the internet and before the term day-trader was invented, I was hooked. I was on my way to a PhD and said “skip that”. So… I have no room to talk when I ask the question with maybe a hint of perjorativeness…. but then again maybe I do.

Back then, in 1993 – 1994, it wasn’t easy to be a short-term trader. I mean very few people had access to quotes or commission rates that would make it remotely possible. Hardly anyone outside of the neighborhood of LaSalle and VanBuren in Chicago even remotely knew what I was talking about. Almost everyone I was trading with had been on the floor of the exchange. In fact, that was really the only way into any kind of short term trading for a living. It was a small and relatively privileged group.

Enter the internet and brokers and traders who want to make some money off of teaching other people supposedly how to trade and now way too many people say “All I want to be is a day-trader”.

It isn’t for the money. The vast majority lose. So what is it?

I believe I know the answer – and it isn’t the lip-service ideas about gambling or thrill. It might be not having a boss or employees but I think it goes deeper than that… What do you think?

Well the wave has finally hit… it seems everyone on or connected to a Wall Street event is interested in hearing more about behavioral finance. PBS’ Nightly Business Report is doing a year-long special, private wealth managers are calling me to speak almost monthly, the largest “alternative investment” conference in the world called…

Yet underlying much of what I hear is still the SAME assumption – control your emotions and in turn control your thinking. But ironically NOTHING could be further from the truth. Know your emotions – yes. Control – NO. Plus, why doesn’t it occur to anyone that logically you only have to control your actions… and emotions and actions are actually two different things.

It is actually a case of “focus bias” or the tendency to confirm what you already think that even though many many scholars and practitioners are interested now in investing behavior, their discussions return right to the same underlying and outdated theories.

If you don’t have your emotional neural networks working, you can’t decide what to wear in the morning and chances are, you may not even recognize clothes as clothes! The latest research shows we need the contextual information – which we feel – for our visual cortices to work.

I am thrilled in the interest … but now let’s take it a step further and get down to business figuring out how to understand and leverage the difference between Emotional Intelligence, blink and The Black Swan!

There must be 10,000 lists like this… let me add mine – hopefully with many useful twists.

1. You need to know what you are looking for – both to enter the market and to exit.

2. You need to know what the variations on #1 are – and what they are not!

3. You need to know what is imprecise about what you are looking for – it is more than you think.

4. You need to have thought about the imprecision long before you sit in front of the screen and certainly not just as you push the button.

5. You need to know what it will feel like if you turn out to be wrong.

6. You need to know how you will handle, manage, learn from and deal with that feeling.

7. You need to know what it will feel like if you are right – and again, how you will handle, manage, learn from and deal with it.

8. You need to know how to operate on the premise that “perfect is the enemy of the good”.

Virtually everyone believes that the key to investing and trading success lies in a better read (and execution on) probabilities. “Expert” after expert, from retail educators like “Be_a_GR8Trdr” to financial engineering labs in Boston, rely on this assumption.

“Assumption” you say? “It isn’t an assumption Denise! It is truth!” Oh really?

First, if it is such a natural truth – like gravity or the sun rising in the east – then why is it so unnatural to do it? Why do day-traders fail at it at an alarming rate while institutions (with their MBA’s and statisticians) also fail at it has been demonstrated through the now 1000’s of behavioral finance studies and real world examples?

Aside from that basic question is the even more important one of “how does the human brain most successfully process market data“? And luckily The Journal of Finance has finally decided to publish what in my opinion is essentially earth-shattering research by Quartz, Bossaerts and Bruguier of The California Institute of Technology. This seminal and singular piece of research sheds a whole new light on the neurological processes involved in accurately reading markets. (And to boot it in turn explains why so many traders fail and why so many institutional traders can get it wrong!)

In short, …”tests show that Theory of Mind (ToM), rather than mathematical, abilities are better predictors of success in forecasting stock markets“.

Of course this begs the question… “what does that mean”? ToM is basically the ability to read other people. It is the mental capacity where you can imagine/see/”know” what they are thinking and feeling and therefore be better predictors of their coming choices of action. (See wikipedia)

In other words, if we go back and look for example at a very public decision – that of Hank Paulson to let Lehman go bankrupt – it had everything to do with the pressure he was under over the idea of “moral hazard” and very little to do with anything else.

Now that example doesn’t help you much when the market is slow and plodding and range bound but I use it because in retrospect it helps people see how a concerted effort in the Summer of 2008 to understand the human dynamics of the decision makers scenarios would have yielded a better idea about what was likely to happen. What I mean by that is if you specifically tried to play out the possibilities post Bear Stearns and pre-Lehman…. you would have come up with “they let at least one bank fail”. Once you had that idea you could see AIG was going down too!

Conversely all the modeling and probability thinking in the world would NEVER have gotten you there!

You can read the original research yourself @ Encoding Financial Signals in the Brain … or on the Social Science Research Network. (The latter compels me to point out that Antoine (Tony), whom I have been bugging for over two years about this, is an Electrical Engineer and he was kind enough to email me this week and let me know the paper had finally been accepted!)

Now the question is how much will the behavioral finance tendencies of status-quo and confirmation bias kick in … and prevent a large majority of people who care about reading markets from really grasping how to capitalize on an assumption turned upside down?

1.    Realize that numbers reveal only ¾ of the picture.
2.    To see 99%, wrap all numbers in a cocoon of qualitative data.
3.    Elevate qualitative analyses to the level of quantitative analyses.
4.    Leverage how all human brains interpret uncertainty.
5.    Differentiate implicit learning from impulse.
5.    Never forget which game you are playing – poker or rugby.

Being interviewed on CNBC & “ABC World News Tonight” on the same day makes it so clear to me how differently the market is viewed depending on what kind of desk you sit behind. I had no sooner walked out of the NYSE when an ABC producer rang (thanks btw to whomever changed the rules so that you can keep the same cell phone number even if you switch carriers – which come to think of it, is a factor in the economy recovery… hmm… a post for Greenfaucet –  but I digress.)

Given that I was actually in the Wall Street subway station and could barely hear, I said “Sure I can stop by after my lunch appointment with the Director of Research @  fund of funds X (hec just because I also share an apartment and two dogs with the man I was meeting didn’t seem THAT relevant)  I figured (assumed) they must want me to talk about the same thing I just got done talking about – how key levels play themselves out in market reversals.

Guess again – and note to self NEVER EVER – even if it is Charlie Gibson (or his proxy) calling skip the pre-interview! The point of the segment was to say that Friday morning’s drop in consumer confidence caused the Monday morning market swoon. But hec, to me, the discretionary high-frequency trader, Friday morning could have been 2001 by Monday afternoon.

But of course, I am the odd man out here – and not viewing the markets the way the “average investor” does. It also brings up some thoughts about the markets really do work – or the infinite loop between fundamentals, facts and fear.

Many traders and investors work off “fundamentals” – i.e. company prospects or economic data. Many traders work off “facts” i.e. the actual price something is trading at and the relationship of that price to prices gone before (some may not think these are enough but they are indeed facts – the S&P is trading right this moment at 984.50 and that IS a fact) and we all can get caught up in the two kinds of fear that drive the market – fear of losing and fear of missing out.

An uncanny phenomenon however is how the facts and the fundamentals converge. Last Friday we had been trading for 8 days at the November highs in the ES S&P mini futures contract when a worse than expected US Consumer confidence number was released – causing the market to take an intraday swoon. Now that swoon was in the making regardless in that we had failed to close above the key swing high for days and days.

So I simply saw it as a failure of a key level – but David Muir saw it as a disappointing confidence reading. Was one of us more right than the other? (Okay I am biased but)… In reality, NO. The two are different lenses used for different types of “photographs” but both explain the subsequent price action.

Fear may be the trump card – if we are rallying hard off of a low – like one made in March – there is a rush to get in and not miss out. If we are falling hard, like we did last Fall, there is a similar albeit more violent rush to get out. And here we are right back in the loop as those rushes change the facts (price) and price influences the fundamentals – at least consumer confidence and a whole slew of other economic or company earnings data.

The lesson here – enter this infinite loop through any door – fear, facts or fundamentals. Just know which one it is so you have the breadcrumb path to get back out!

A few years ago I discovered Tom Alexander of Alexander Trading and finally “got” what those wacky charts with the horizontal letters were saying. The next thing I did was strip my Tradestation charts of all of their fibs, oscillators and graphics that had accumulated over the years.

Why? Well in studying various forms of technical analysis since 1994 I knew a bit about candles, EW, Drummond geometry, fibonacci’s … you name it. All seemed to have some value. When actually I finally listened to someone who understood auction market theory I realized that every thing I more or less knew about TA was encapsulated in a market profile chart.

Case in point was yesterday. I wasn’t really planning on trading but I keep my basic ES market profile chart up. I could see (and tweeted to Twitter (@traderpsyches)) that we were developing a trend day down in the AM. Each of the first four half hour periods had lower lows and lower highs … and then I saw it. I shove lower and a bounce…. right to the highest volume node (Tom calls them key reference areas or kra’s.? (He is @kratrader on twitter and stocktwits) of the day.

Now when more volume has accumulated at a price (over time), that means there are lots of traders in trades where that is their break even point. It tends to mean they will add to their trade there – or defend it – or if they were long from there, in this case, they will be back to break even and get out. Since I was going short, it basically meant we shouldn’t go too far through that price because of those traders who care about that price. If we do, well then they have been overwhelmed by another group. In short, (no pun), it meant this was a good place to be short.

I put a tight stop in at 941 (trade entered at 939). My Ninja trader platform helped a whole lot here because we did in fact trade at 941 but I was not taken out because my Ninja strategy is set to trigger the stop only if there are less than 50 trades on the offer (in the short scenario).

It took a fair amount of having to talk through the chop and slop but then around 1 p.m. (over an hour into the trade) …. whoosh…. and a basic 10 points I had.

I looked at the drop. Trailed my stop (which Ninja would do automatically I just didn’t have it set up in this strategy)? and then saw we really were at the next KRA or high volume node from two days earlier – again a place where other traders will be more willing to be involved because many of them already are involved at that price. So I covered… knowing it might go lower.

In the end, I think I covered about as well as could be expected. In other words, the whole thing was almost the perfect trade. (In contrast to Monday when I tweeted about rotating back into the range just prior to the violent move upward – and then wrote about it on Greenfaucet.com)

The long and the short of it is – market development as can easily be seen through a market profile chart and as taught by Tom Alexander hugely simplifies the process of understanding the market – for me. I suggest everyone take a look -

Alexander Trading

Ninja Trader

(btw they don’t know I am writing this and I won’t get anything for it…it just works and that trade went so well and was so public on twitter that it seemed right to explain).

btw2 – if you have trading strategies and tactics that you really understand and feel good about – PLEASE IGNORE all of this!! Please!)

The vast majority of the investing world wants to feel as if we have seen the bottom. They never put their flashlights down looking for the glimmers of hope, or mustard seeds as Kudlow calls them, that the worst is behind us.

But why should it be?

Technically the market has to take out the last high which at a minimum is ES 942.75 and clearly on its last two tries it couldn’t get through the 875 area. As Boaz Weinstein who I wrote about last week was prone to say “this isn’t rocket surgery.” Bear markets are bear markets as long as you get lower highs… which is exactly what we have… the only question is WHEN not where will the next low be?

If you heard the term, what would you think?

to be continued ….