At our trading workshop this weekend, wr reviewed a numbver of what I consider to be milion dollar ideas: ideaswhich, over the course of a lifetime should produce a net value add greater than a million dollars in trading performance. While we were doing that in the middle of our assembled traders and institutional money managers, the idea of reflective learning came up several times. here is a key insight.
When you are viewing charts of previous trades and you suddenyl see a pattern or a technique that was not apparent to you the first time, it is easy to classify the failure to see it and act upon it as a “mistake”. Think about the power of the words we use to characterize these kinds of events. If you call it a mistake then you are basically treating your reflective learning as an opportunity to beat your self up. Is it really healthy or useful to feel terrible about missed opportunities that you only discover by opening yourself up to the possibility of learning? No wonder we hate school.
Its not fair to label the person we were in the past in the heat of the moment of trading, sitting here in the comfort of our ivory tower, no stress and with the perfect insight of hindsight.