The Intuitive Trader: Developing Your Inner Trading Wisdom

by Robert Koppel

Cultivate the skills necessary to follow your business intuitions

No matter how much background and training a trader or investor has, intuition remains the key personal asset to attaining financial success. Success depends on refining your intuition to a level that allows you to take the next step with unshakable confidence. But bringing yourself to this level is a daunting challenge--one that often requires you to override the logic of your acquired knowledge. With insights from industry success stories, exercises, and analysis from psychologists and psychiatrists, The Intuitive Trader shows traders and investors how to capitalize on their powerful intuitive skills so that they can take their trading to a new level.

* Interviews with preeminent psychologists and psychiatrists about developing intuition
* Extensive exercises that show the reader how to use intuition to enhance trading performance
* Words of wisdom from successful traders and investors, including Tony Saliba, Linda Raschake, Paul Tudor Jones, Jimmy Rodgers, and George Soros

ROBERT KOPPEL (Chicago, Illinois) is President of Future Skills, a Chicago-based consulting firm that works with individual traders, CTA's and brokerage firms. A former member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he is a partner in Skylane Trading, a clearing firm backed by Daiwa Securities. Koppel is the author of The Inner Game of Trading and The Outer Game of Trading, and he frequently lectures on the psychology of sound investing.

Genres: Economics

259 pages, Hardcover

First published April 19, 1996

Reviews

[Jack Hart · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have a bunch of books on "the inner game" of this, that, and the other thing. Some of them are pretty good, and some are pretty bad. I remembered this one as pretty bad, but hadn't read it in years (it came out in 1996). So I decided to read it again as an investigation of an old gut reaction. I found out that rereading it didn't change my sour response, and here is my list of reasons why I found it so limited.

1) It's derivative. A bunch of other "inner game" type books are quoted to the point that it reads like a quotation quilt.

2) The information is delivered in a series of interviews divided into two sections: therapist types and traders. In the first section one guy is a martial artist and has a dojo, another is an NLP dude, one teaches progressive relaxation, and so on. Their interviews sometimes start to sound like an infomercial for a seminar which has probably been defunct for twenty years.

3)In the second set of interviews you have four successful traders who talk about their definition of intuition and how they became intuitive traders. All the stories are the same: They worked hard, stayed positive, and it came to them.

4) There's a lot of brutally cliche stuff said delivered to the reader as a gift. For example:

Commitment to hard work and self-improvement may seem to be an obvious point; however, in reality I believe it's the essential point.

Or:

I am a firm believer in the power of positive thinking.

Or (again):

What works? Hark work works! That's it! Work. Work. Work. You know, in anything, to get it without working is not satisfying for the most part, and if you don't work hard, more than likely it won't work.

These are not passing remarks made by interviewees on their way to more interesting points. They are the themes, or rather the truisms, hammered on again and again.

--

Clearly I was frustrated with the book, but it's only fair to say it's not written for someone like me. Maybe the right-left brain stuff and the West-East stuff was less in the air in 1996, and maybe a reader who knew a lot about technical analysis and the mechanics of trading who hadn't considered the role that one's frame of mind plays in the success of any given strategic approach would find some light bulbs going on.

I did finish the book which I rarely would do for a book that seemed to offer so little. As I look through it I find a sentence or phrase ticked here and there--indications that the book offered some clarifications and distinctions even to my jaded eye. I was especially intrigued by the idea, introduced several times, but never developed beyond statement, that: "Trading is self discovery. You can tell who you are and what you are by how you trade." Is that Self Important Big Talk by a practionar about his practice? Or, is the riddle of trading coeval with the deeper mysteries of selfhood? The book didn't help me find my way into that issue, although it's one that stayed with me.

But mostly I had the impression of people with tacit knowledge struggling to explain what they had learned, and falling back on garbled lore and the commonplaces beloved by self-made men and women since the beginning of the middle class.

[Jacqui Schischka · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book contained a lot of really great information about trading intuition and how it works to the advantage of the best traders. Unfortunately it didn't really talk about developing it other than working hard and getting trading experience. But I still found it valuable and will likely re-read it at a later date.