Hank Pruden on "Behavioral Finance" and Technical Analysis

Hank Pruden’s theory of "Behavioral Finance" proposes that human flaws are consistent, measurable and predictable, and being aware of and utilizing this phenomenon can benefit a trader.

"For the better part of 30 years, the discipline of finance has been under the thrall of the random walk\cum efficient market hypothesis. Yet enough anomalies piled up in recent years to crack the dominance of the random walk. As a consequence, the popular press has been reporting the market behavior," said Pruden. One of these new methods discussed is "behavioral finance."

Pruden is a professor in the School of Business at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. He was a featured speaker at the 20th annual Telerate Seminars Technical Analysis Group Conference (TAG 20).

Behavioral finance is "the use of psychology, sociology and other behavioral theories to explain and predict financial markets. Behavioral finance describes the behavior of investors and money managers and their interaction in companies and securities markets. It recognizes the roles of varying attitudes toward risk-framing of information, cognitive errors, lack of self-control, regret in financial decision-making and the influence of mass or herd psychology," said Pruden.

Predictable human behavior can and does impact markets, said Pruden. One example is the "crowd psychology" or "bandwagon" theory. For example, if a market is coming up from a basing area on the charts, "smart money" is responsible for the majority of the initial buying. "As people jump on board, we see the bandwagon effect, and that bandwagon pushes prices up. Volume tends to surge at its peak, certainly on the buy side, during the mark-up phase in the middle. Later on, toward the end of the trend, smart money is not doing the buying; somebody else is. The smart money is doing the selling. The market tops by curving over, or sometimes with a spike top. So, we can see express that in price and we can see under it in volume," said Pruden.

Regarding the type of trading approach to the bandwagon effect, Pruden said, "We align our indicators to show a distribution pattern or a breaking of trendlines, and we should see a post-volume peak. Volume will typically peak before a big change in sentiment."

Pruden said he puts time, price and sentiment together to come up with a composite to look at all those parameters at once. This composite would help in any trading decision, he said.

In the four major elements of technical analysis - price, volume, time and sentiment - recognizing and factoring in human behavior is certainly a major portion of the sentiment element, said Pruden.

At Golden Gate University, Pruden developed and teaches accredited courses in technical market analysis.

Make An Honest Self Appraisal

If you are willing to accept total responsibility for your investment results, you will realize that you are the most important factor in your trading or investment success. If you have done that, you are way ahead of the crowd.

I once had a call from a gentleman in England who had been working with my home study course. He said, "I've been working through the course for over six months. It's helped me realize a lot about myself, but there is one thing it hasn't done. It hasn't given me a positive expectancy system." The ironic thing about that statement is that I had not attempted to give a methodology. There are several reasons for that: 1) If you want to be good, you must design something that fits you. That only is possible if you design the methodology. 2) Psychology is far more important than methodology. In fact, psychology is part of methodology. For example, when we attempt to help people develop a reasonable method that works, they resist it strongly because they have so many biases that keep them focused on the wrong aspect of trading - areas that have nothing to do with success. And it is very difficult to show them the correct direction.

As a result, the best thing you can do for yourself to increase your income from the market is to determine how you are blocking yourself. This should be done at two levels. Whenever you develop a trading business plan a great deal of that plan should have to do with introspection. Take a look at all of your beliefs. Are they useful beliefs or do they hinder you in some way? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What about you can't you see clearly because you are part of it? You should look at doing this sort of assessment at least once each quarter.

The second self-appraisal you need to make is at the beginning of the day - and perhaps even hourly throughout the day. What's going on in your life? Are you ready to face the markets? How are you feeling? Is there some sort of self-sabotage surfacing in you? For example, are you starting to get too confident? Are you starting to get too greedy? Do you in any way want to override your system? The best traders and investors are constantly doing this sort of self-assessment. If you want to make money in the market, then perhaps you should start doing the same.

Behavioral Patterns That Sabotage Traders - Part I

Although I do not maintain a private practice of counseling/coaching for traders, it is perhaps inevitable that traders would contact me for assistance after reading my book on The Psychology of Trading. Once in a while I take on a project of working with a group of traders because of the opportunity to push the envelope and use psychology to improve their trading performance. In the past few years, I would guesstimate that I have gathered personality questionnaire data and assisted over one hundred traders.

That's a decent-sized sample, and provides me with worthwhile insights into the minds of traders and the problem patterns that interfere with their trading. Below I outline a few of the things I have learned from questionnaires and interviews with individuals who are trading for a living.

• Most trading problems are varieties of performance anxiety. Performance anxiety occurs when a performance that is usually automatic becomes the object of excessive scrutiny. This attention to the performance creates an interference effect, in which the performance can no longer flow naturally. Such performance anxiety frequently interferes with athletic performance, public speaking, sexual performance, and test taking. Whenever fears about the outcome of a performance dominate the performance, outcomes are apt to suffer.
• Performance anxiety occurs as much during times of market success as during times of market loss. It is not at all unusual to find traders who are good at taking (appropriate) losses, but who become fearful when they book a gain and take profits prematurely (i.e., prior to reaching their profit targets). Interference effects following strings of losses are no more debilitating than interference effects from pressure that traders feel when they are making money.
• Traders commonly try to replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk during trading. This is a mistake. When traders are immersed in the market and focused on the screen, they are not engaging in self-talk at all.
• Perfectionism is the most common source of performance anxiety among traders. Traders tend to be achievement-oriented and often set lofty goals for themselves. These performance goals contribute to tension when the goals are not met. In general, it makes sense to replace performance goals with process goals. Instead of setting a goal of making $250,000 a year, a trader should, for example, set a goal of following a trading plan (entries, position sizes, exits) on 90+% of all occasions.
• Perfectionism leads traders to overtrade. Overtrading is the most common source of losses among the traders I've interviewed. Traders overtrade when they feel internal pressures to make money that blind the trader to what is happening in the markets at the time. Trading when volatility is low, trading outside one's trading plan or strengths, trading to make up a loss, and trading imprudently large size are examples of overtrading.
• Traders that master performance anxiety at one level of size (e.g., 5 contracts) frequently re-encounter it once they meaningfully increase their size (50 contracts). We generally calibrate our emotions by the dollar amounts we make or lose. This makes a fifty contract trade much more difficult for traders than a five contract trade, even though the setups may be identical.
• Traders often think they have worse psychological problems than they actually have. When performance anxiety patterns have interfered with trading for a considerable period of time, traders often become convinced that they have deeply-seated emotional problems that need intensive psychotherapy. Often, the self-perception that one is damaged - that one is emotionally unfit - is a larger problem than the performance anxiety itself, which is a very solvable problem.

To be sure, there are problems other than ones related to performance fears that can interfere with trading. Many of these are described in my book. The unique thing about performance anxiety is that it can afflict highly successful traders every bit as much as rookies. This is because the root of much of the anxiety - perfectionism - tends to be present in the most achievement-oriented and successful individuals. It is truly a double-edged sword.

Somewhere between the extremes of performance pressure and complacent laziness is a happy medium where traders can focus on self-improvement without sabotaging their results. Trading is like dating: You want to keep initial expectations reasonable, enjoy it while it's happening, and learn from it once it's over. In the second and final article in this series, I will take a look at strategies traders can use to overcome performance pressures.

Enjoy Bumping Into Walls

This is a new section featuring Peak Performance Trading Tips. These won't be tips on some hot new investment. Instead, they'll be tips on how you get yourself in the best possible condition mentally to perform at a peak level. We'll be doing one new tip each month. You may have heard some of them in one form or another before, but you can never apply them enough. As a result, these tips should become second nature to you.

In any endeavor in life, you have up and down periods. Dealing with the market has many such up and down periods. In order to profit from the up periods, you have to tolerate or even “enjoy” the down periods.

I'm an NLP modeler. That means if someone does something well, I can figure out the essence of what they are doing by understanding their thinking. Thus, when such a person goes from A to B easily and effortlessly, I can determine how they do it and teach that skill to other people.

It turns out that one of the major problems people have in going from their current location to their desired goal is all of the walls or obstacles they continually run into each day. There is a common solution to these obstacles — make them okay. Don't worry about getting from point A to B, just enjoy bumping into the walls.

If you're in the market, one of biggest obstacles you'll face is the wall of losses. It's fairly difficult dealing with the markets if you are not willing to lose. It's almost impossible. It's like wanting to be alive, but always wanting to breathe in and not willing to breathe out.

When you want to be right, you're not dealing with the obstacles. Instead, you're forcing things. When you want to make a profit out of today's trade, even though it's a big loser, then you're not dealing with today's obstacle. Enjoy the obstacle — embrace it — and be willing to accept it. If the market tells you it's time to get out at a loss, then do so.

Quite often traders take the relationship they are having with the market, and transmute it by developing a different system or trading with a professional money manager. Now, the old struggle they used to have with the market—of not accepting what the market gives them—becomes a similar struggle they are having with their system or with their new advisor.

Instead of giving up on the market after a string of losses, just in time to miss the really big move, they avoid their system until it is doing really well. When it is showing tremendous profits, they jump on board — only to be blown away by the market. And the same thing happens when they invest with money managers. This desire to be “right” motivates them to jump to the top money manager when he's hot, only to go through a big string of losses. It's all the same thing.

Psychologically, if you don't come to grips with your obstacles and embrace them, you will simply find another way to repeat them. Realize that the walls occur because they are there for you to bump into. When you accept this fact and embrace it, you'll accept bumping into walls. And strangely enough, you hardly even notice that the walls are there. The result will be a new level of success in the markets.

Van Tharp Back-To-Basics Series

What Does Van Tharp Mean When He Says:

"We Only Trade our Beliefs About the Markets"?

If you are a regular student of Van Tharp's work or reader of this newsletter you hear this a lot: You can't trade the markets, you can only trade your beliefs about the market. Let's explore what this really means.

As a long time modeler of what makes great traders great, Van understands that to model effectively you have to find out what highly accomplished people do in common. Once you get the common tasks that produce excellent behavior, you need to get the ingredients of those tasks. Those ingredients include the beliefs, the mental states, and the mental strategies necessary to carry out those tasks.

Let's look at some statements and see what you believe about them:

• The market is a dangerous place to invest. (You are right.)
• The market is a safe place to invest. (You are right.)
• Wall Street controls the markets and it's hard for the little guy. (You are right.)
• You can easily make money in the markets. (You are right.)
• It's hard to make money in the markets. (You are right.)
• You need to have lots of information before you can trade profitably. (You are right.)

Do you notice the theme?

You are right about every one of these beliefs (whether you said yes or no to any of them). If you don't believe in any of these statements, what do you believe instead? You are right about that too! However, there is no real right/wrong answer. Some people will have the same beliefs and agree with you and others won't.

Therefore, whatever your beliefs about the markets are, they will direct your thinking and your subsequent actions.

What is a Belief?

Beliefs are a primary way to filter information from the world. Beliefs are judgments, categorizations, meanings or comparisons. They determine how we perceive reality and relationships in reality. What you expect (i.e. your reality) depends upon your beliefs and they are largely unconscious. Every sentence in this document represents one or two beliefs, including this one.

One of the beliefs that is most productive for good trading is the belief that you are totally responsible for your own results as a trader. When you adopt this belief, then you can learn from your mistakes. However, if you tend to blame someone else (your broker, your spouse, the person giving you tips) or even the market for the results that you get, then you will tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

When traders "own their problems" and assume responsibility for the results produced, then they discover that their results come from some sort of mental state that either allowed them to 1) follow their rules, 2) not follow their rules, or 3) trade without having any rules.

When traders take the time to write down all their beliefs (about themselves, the markets, money, etc.), then they can establish a much better idea of what they want to trade, and how they want to trade. They can also see flaws in their thinking much easier. It is valuable to know which beliefs support you as a trader, and which ones hinder your progress.

What is a Mental State?

Every task has an optimal mental state that will allow you to accomplish it effortlessly. For example, to execute a trade you benefit from courage and total commitment. Fear, in contrast, is a big disadvantage as a mental state for executing trades.

Mental states are primarily what most people call discipline or emotional control. Examples include: being impatient with the markets, being afraid of the markets or being too optimistic about the markets.

Controlling your mental states is just part of the answer, but when you can see that you are the creator of your own results as a trader, then you can really make progress.

What is a Mental Strategy?

To understand mental strategies, you have to understand how people think. People think in their five sensory modalities (that is, in terms of visual images, sounds, feelings, taste and smell).

A mental strategy is the step by step way in which you use these modalities; it is the specific sequence of your thinking. For example, the most effective strategy for the action step of executing a trade is to 1) see the signal, 2) recognize internally that this is the signal you decided you should take, 3) feel good about it, and 4) take action. If you do anything else, you probably won't be able to take action or it will be very slow.

The Psychology of Trading

Once you have a clear understanding of which beliefs, mental states and mental strategies are the core factors in top trading performance, you can then teach the same skills to others and have them perform well too. And when you can see this success duplicated in others, which we have been able to do in most aspects of trading, then you know you have a workable model.

The key psychological traits of top traders are

1. Personal Responsibility
2. Commitment
3. Their psychological "profile"
4. Working on personal issues (e.g., self sabotage)

Trading fundamentals include the Ten Tasks of Trading.

1. Self Analysis
2. Mental Rehearsal
3. Low-Risk Idea Development
4. Stalking
5. Action
6. Monitoring
7. Abort
8. Take Profits
9. Daily Debriefing
10. Periodic Review

Traders need to be reminded of these tasks and to eliminate any self-sabotage that keeps them from following the tasks. Van teaches all of these steps in detail in his various products and workshops.

Van Tharp believes that everything revolves around your beliefs, mental states and mental strategies, so with that in mind, everything about trading is 100% psychological, including why and how you trade and which system you will follow or build.

Many traders have a hard time "believing" this and it is almost the antithesis of what people learn in academic finance. So only you can decide whether it is worth the time to learn more about yourself and the psychological aspects of trading.

People get exactly what they want out of the markets. Most people are afraid of success or failure. As a result, they tend to resist change and continue to follow their natural biases and lose in the markets. When you get rid of the fear, you tend to get rid of the biases ~ Van K. Tharp, Ph.D.

Know When to Fold 'Em

One of my hobbies is playing poker and I can do it for free online. When I visit a casino and play poker, I usually make money. However, when I started to play online with play money, I had tremendous difficulty making money. And that didn't make sense to me because I knew that most of the people I was playing against were terrible. Why couldn't I make money?

However, one day I read a poker book by a professional who said that he had the same experience in low-limit games in Las Vegas. He said that when he had a good hand, he typically had five or six bad players staying with him. One of them would typically make a very lucky draw and he would be beaten.

Once he figured out what was happening, however, he rarely lost again. And his secret was knowing when to fold 'em. In Texas Hold'em, every player is dealt two cards face down. These are your unique cards that you must use, although with five common cards that are dealt face up, to make the best five card poker hand. You typically bet your hand after you see your two "pocket cards;" after the fist three common cards (called the flop); and after the fourth and fifth cards respectively.

Bad players typically play most starting hands they are dealt, but if there are enough bad players, then one of them will get a good draw that will beat most people. So the solution to beating them is to only play the outstanding starting hands - the hands that will typically win the pot 30% of the time or better. That means that you must FOLD 80% of the hands you are dealt. You never play them and in most cases, it doesn't cost you anything not to play a bad hand.

One of the advantages we have as traders is that we do not have to trade. And it costs nothing to not trade. So the common solution is to only take a position in outstanding trades. And these are usually either trades that are moving strongly in your favor before you enter or trades that are so highly undervalued that you are getting an investment at a small fraction of what it is worth.

One of the highest starting hands in poker is an Ace-King of the same suit. In a ten person game, this starting hand will typically win 68.6% of the time. But it usually does require some help to win. Suppose you are dealt an Ace-King of hearts which you bet so you can see some more cards. However, the next three cards are a 3 of clubs, a jack of diamonds, and a 7 of spades. Those three cards didn't help you at all. You don't even have a pair in your hand and you only have two more cards to see. Now the odds don't look good that this will be one of the 68.6% of the hands that an Ace King of the same suit will win. You should fold that hand, especially if other people are betting heavily. And again, it won't cost you much money at this stage to fold - just the amount of your initial bet.

The same occurs when you invest in a stock. You buy the stock because it is going up. However, once you buy it, it starts to slowly go down. After several weeks, it's down about 5%. At this point it's like the bad poker hand - you should walk away from it. The odds, right now, don't seem to be in your favor.

Bad players will typically play bad hands to begin with and they'll stay with good hands that don't get supported as more cards are revealed. If you become more conservative with the odds, only playing the best hands, you'll probably win most of them and lose very little money.

One of the golden rules of trading is to cut your losses short and this means get out of trades that don't seem to be working in your favor. Next, week we'll talk about the opposite situation, when the poker hand or the trade starts to look really good.

Do What You Love

I have a pretty good taste in art, I think. At least, I can go into most art galleries, find the piece that I like the best, and it is usually one of the most expensive pieces in the gallery. I can do that except for abstract art. I remember one gallery in Paris that we went into. This artist had a very expressionist style and I liked most of the work in the gallery, but it was all very expensive.

With that introduction, I'd like to mention that I've watched my wife learn art and go from beginning artist to a fantastic artist in a period of about 5-10 years. Many of her pieces might now be the type of work that I'd tend to gravitate to in a gallery.

And I think her art turned the corner as a result of two things she did. First, she went to an Avatar workshop in Ireland. She didn't think that she got that much out of the workshop, but her painting took a leap forward after that workshop. She said that somehow it freed her creative expressive.

The second thing she did was to start a program in a book called The Artists Way by Julie Cameron. As she worked through the program I noticed that her art was getting better and better. She painted her first painting in the style of the artist we both admired in Paris and my feeling was that it was as good as his work.

At this point, what I noticed was that Kala was really loving her work. She actually opened up a web site called www.kalatharp.com to sell her painting. She painting two pieces for her brother in Singapore and he thought that they were pieces that she had bought. And our friend DR Barton actually commissioned her to paint something for his study. And the work was fabulous.

So what does this have to do with trading and success? I've noticed that the people who are really successful in many, many fields start some sort of program of self improvement. I have mentioned many of those in past tips and the Artists Way is one of them. They move into what they love to do and as they commit to it (because they love it) all sorts of things happen to make it work for them

And one day my wife announced to me, “No one has more self-sabotage than me,” as she was going through her program. I was delighted to hear her say that, not because it is true, but because when people begin to think that, then I know they've come a long way in their self-work program. In fact, just saying that told me that she was way ahead of most people who are so numb to their self-sabotage that they are not even aware of it. It shows in her art and it shows in her way of being. I'm very proud of her.

In our Super Trader program, I have most of the people in there spend at least six months (or perhaps a year) of their two years doing psychological work. And as they begin to get insights of how much self-sabotage they really do have, and also get the desire to move through it all, then I know they'll make it.