Here’s how to beat your trading bias

Subconscious biases can have an adverse effect on your trading. John C Burford explains how his methods can help you avoid them.

We all make bad choices. And for that we can at least partly blame our inability to resist the genetic, neurological, psychological, emotional and social forces that shape our lives. It's these influences that result in biases becoming deeply ingrained features of our brain function. And that's what makes us human.

As traders, we are certainly not immune to human nature. The subconscious biases that shape our decision making also influence our approach to trading. But avoiding biases can be tricky especially since we usually aren't even aware they exist. In fact, we probably have more than one bias that adversely affects our trading performance.

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John is is a British-born lapsed PhD physicist, who previously worked for Nasa on the Mars exploration team. He is a former commodity trading advisor with the US Commodities Futures Trading Commission, and worked in a boutique futures house in California in the 1980s.

 

He was a partner in one of the first futures newsletter advisory services, based in Washington DC, specialising in pork bellies and currencies. John is primarily a chart-reading trader, having cut his trading teeth in the days before PCs.

 

As well as his work in the financial world, he has launched, run and sold several 'real' businesses producing 'real' products.