From Faceless Bureaucrat to Bad Assed Trader: Peak Performance

Bad Assed Trader: Following yesterday’s blog about the troughs of performance – in life and in trading – I hope you will bear with me whilst I indulge in a more self-congratulatory tone and dwell for a few moments on some of my performance peaks. I don’t do this to brag but to share the learning…honest.

Today is the right day to do this as it’s my wedding anniversary and I’m thrilled to still be so happily married to my husband and looking forward to watching our wedding DVD in the near future with him when we can have a good laugh over it all again.

When following Steenbarger’s instructions to draw a line of peaks and troughs representing my life and another representing my trading (see yesterday’s blog "Is trading more stressful than having babies?" for explanation) I would put my wedding day as one of my highest peaks – along with the birth of my two girls.

Why would I mark it as a peak? Not just because it was such a happy day but because I feel it represented my strengths being deployed to the very best effect. For example, I had started planning my wedding speech (yes, readers, I’m afraid I was a bride who insisted on inflicting a speech on her guests) over a year before the big day.

There were so many important things that I wanted to share with everyone and I spent that year crafting that speech. I wanted to make people laugh and cry because part of the joy of weddings is the celebration of emotions. I wanted to tell them why I love my husband so much and I wanted to acknowledge the huge contribution his late wife – who had died 8 years previously – had made to him and his daughters and therefore to me (I had never met her).

When I was delivering the speech I was heartened by the laughter at my little quips which sounded genuine (bless them) and kept me going. But it was afterwards that I was astonished and rewarded for my efforts.

I had wanted people to cry, I know that sounds a bit odd but I wanted people to feel as I felt and to appreciate what it means to marry someone who was very happily married before and so tragically lost their love. But as I asked people to toast my husband’s late wife and then went to sit down I turned to my groom and saw tears in his eyes. That made my heart leap as he’s not a man who ever cries or shows tears. Then I saw a neighbour dissolve completely in tears and as I looked around the room I realised the impact I had had on the 120 people present.

People then applauded and started coming over to congratulate me, many of them telling me it was the best wedding speech they had ever heard, and although I think they were being kind I did believe they meant it right then because it really was pretty good. I’m not a natural speaker but I had put so much time and effort into that speech that I really did achieve my own “peak performance”.

My husband and I both put a huge amount of work into planning our wedding day and it really did go absolutely perfectly in every respect. We had amazing friends who helped us enormously – they offered and we accepted.

When I think about the strengths I used to best effect in planning my wedding day and compare that performance with the best trades I have placed I know that there is no substitute for good planning and considering every possible risk and taking action to mitigate it.

I understand that to make it at trading I need to be operating at peak performance for a greater proportion of the time I spend trading than I have been. Going the extra mile is easy when you are preparing your wedding day – you have huge emotional attachment to the outcome of your efforts and it’s a once in a lifetime effort. With trading it is difficult to sustain that level of performance consistently but I know it needs to be done. If you start to compromise on your standards your performance drops dramatically.

I have struggled with this issue because so often in life I’ve been able to get away with being “good enough” quite easily. It makes you lazy and complacent. It’s difficult to admit to this when you generally see yourself as a relatively high performer in life.

Being “good enough” does not appear to be possible in trading. You have to be consistently excellent in your objective and yet flexible analysis, consistently excellent with your standards in selecting only the highest probability trades and consistently excellent in your discipline in executing your trades in accordance with your plan and still maintaining an objective and yet flexible assessment of the potential of the trade.

My coach, Emmanuel, once said to me “It’s a fine line between profit and loss” and his words have haunted me ever since as I’ve seen the evidence of it with my own eyes. The minute you drop your standards and trade at less than peak performance you start to cross that line from profit to loss.

It’s thrilling to be involved in an endeavour that is so personally challenging and I find myself constantly thinking about how I can improve my performance.

So when I reflect on the glory of my wedding day and recall the emotional investment behind its success I understand that to succeed at trading I must make a similar investment, every trading day. There has to be passion to the point of obsession. Nothing less will work.