Emotional Intelligence : What It Is and Why It Is Important For Traders

 

Speaking about psychological competences, important for a trader, I would first and foremost single out emotional intelligence. Under emotional intelligence, I understand the ability to distinguish and name your own and other people’s emotional states. Why is emotional intelligence important for traders? I suppose that many traders would like to “get rid of emotions” to avoid losses that emotions often cause. However, such ridding would make a person unable to make decisions. An ability to find your way in complicated social situations that are influenced by the “psychology of a crowd” (and a financial market is exactly such a situation) presumes not only the skill to single out patterns (graphic, statistical) from a mass of data but also to feel correctly the market sentiment. To a larger part, market sentiment is the information unavailable to algorithms (though there are attempts to create algorithms that would estimate market sentiment). Putting things very simply, we might say that the price impulse, spurting from a range and supported by professional demand/supply, will provoke the stereotypical reaction of traders who will try to sell at “inflated” prices. As a result, the trend will further be moved mostly by the emotional reaction of short-term traders who would be closing their positions. A high level of emotional intelligence will let the trader detect such situations and react accordingly. For sure, the main role of emotional intelligence is to detect your own emotions. If a person (trader) experiences some emotional state that they cannot recognize, this might distort the perception of the market and push out some important information. Simply speaking, the trader will start looking for reasons to make a trade (and find them). In contrast to a simple reactive action, when the trader moves the Stop Loss or “enjoys revenge” on the market, the process here is much more complicated and hard to detect. A trader with distorted perception of reality will be sure that their analysis has been objective, accounting for all necessary factors; alas, their attention will be focused very selectively.

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