While we forever remind you that we (here at PWA) — on behalf of our clients — are investors, as opposed to traders, in our perpetual endeavor to understand what motivates market players we’ve found that studying the methodology of short-term traders helps us put short-term volatility into perspective.
As it turns out, great traders and great investors share many of the very same qualities. To name four: a defined methodology, discipline, focus and lack of emotion.
In Gorman and Kennedy’s instructive Visual Guide to Elliott Wave Trading, one of the authors captures the fundamental key to successful trading. Which happens to apply every bit as much to successful investing as well:
“I learned the hard way over many years that skilled analysis is a mastery of observation, while successful trading is a mastery of self.”