Thin-sliced coaching

...continued from yesterday

Scientific studies involving thin-slicing include studies about how athletes make decisions during their game. The studies show that athletes often have inaccurate ideas of what their winning moves were. In other words, athletes consciously believe their winning moves were ABC whereas the actual winning moves were XYZ.

Vic Braden coached several superstar athletes. His clients included tennis superstar Andre Agassi. Braden video recorded Agassi’s games. One such video recording was a study of Agassi’s forehand swing.

According to Braden “Almost every pro in the world says that he uses his wrist to roll the racket over the ball when he hits a forehand…We can tell with digitized imaging whether a wrist turns an eigth of a degree. But players almost never move their wrist at all…Look how fixed it is. He doesn’t move his wrist until long after the ball is hit. He thinks he’s moving it at impact, but actually not moving it until long after impact. How can so many people be fooled? People are going to coaches and paying hundreds of dollars to be taught how to roll their wrist over the ball, and all that’s happening is that the nunber of injuries to the arm is exploding”.

So have you done that as a trader? Gone to a coach to get yourself trained to trade the way that a model profitable trader says he trades?

Maybe whatever the model profitable trader honestly believes about how he trades isn’t really how he does it. Based on research findings such as that of Braden, maybe the explanations of superior performance given by model profitable traders are inaccurate.

continued tomorrow ...

Copyright 2007 Raymond T. Lee. All rights reserved.
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