I just watched the Titans of Tomorrow podcast episode with Jeff Holden from SMB Capital. It was a seriously valuable conversation with a lot of practical takeaways for traders who want to adopt a professional approach.
A few points stood out to me that I wanted to offer a reflection on from the perspective of a high-performance psychologist working with traders.
Structure first. Psychology second.
I completely agree with this take. Without a solid base of skill in trading and a highly refined playbook informing what you need to do in the market to make money, all the resilience and emotional composure in the world won’t make a difference. I’d argue that psychology becomes more of a performance lever, the higher the level you’re operating at as a trader.
While structure is the priority, psychology can also indirectly support refining structure. In my experience working with professional traders, sometimes trying to resolve an issue on the psychology side can shine a spotlight on something that needs to be addressed from the strategy/ structural side of things that the trader wasn’t previously aware of. And when that happens, the fix is structural, not psychological.
When a trader is prepared to work on both, and has the understanding and measurement tools to differentiate between what’s a psychology issue and what’s a strategy/ structural issue, they hit the sweet spot for performance optimisation.
On the example of a trader exiting half their position early to manage their psychology.
This underscores a really important trading psychology principle. The aim is not to create a trading system that accommodates psychological pressure points (e.g., defining a plan that accounts for a high level of anxiety at keeping a full position on in a winning trade). The aim of optimising psychology is to enable the trader to execute the plan that is structurally best to follow from a pure trading perspective.
In this example, if a trader is managing their psychology (emotions like fear or anxiety) by following a plan that pre-emptively accounts for psychological discomfort (exiting half the position on a giant trend trade almost right away), I’d frame that as solving the wrong problem. The issue isn’t partial exits per se, it’s when the exit is driven by discomfort rather than by the trade’s logic. The plan should be set by the trading logic, and then the trader should cultivate the mental and emotional skill to execute on that plan. Not the other way around.
Not relying on psychometric questionnaires for hiring traders.
I agree with this too. Psychometrics are very helpful tools for generating discussion and reflection, but I personally choose not to use them in my own practice with traders and other high performers. I believe you can learn a lot more about a person and their beliefs/ capabilities/ blind spots by listening intently to their perspective of how things are and asking the right questions.
Psychometrics definitely have their place, but solely relying on them to the exclusion of deeply listening to the person in front of you and applying your own experience and intuition to assess the fit is too reductive to risk a hiring decision on, in my opinion.
The goal of trading psychology is not strictly about helping a trader to adhere to their edge.
This is the one point where I’d offer a slightly different framing, though I suspect the difference comes down to definitions. To me, performance psychology is about working on the mental and emotional factors that enable a person to execute the behaviours that constitute peak performance. It’s not about simply having a positive mindset, it’s about conditioning predictable, pre-defined behaviours. And I’d argue that recognising when your edge is no longer in play and taking action is one of those behaviours.
A deeply understood playbook defines not just the setup, but the conditions under which the setup is invalid. So when a trader steps aside or adjusts because the edge isn’t there, they’re not abandoning the system, they’re executing a deeper layer of it.
If an NFL athlete needs to switch to a different play to respond more appropriately to whatever is occurring on the field, they are still in essence “adhering to the plan”. In other words, “adhering to the plan” (properly defined) already includes deviations that are sanctioned by the plan itself.
Intuition and creativity have a really important part to play in skilled trading, but when the plan itself defines where discretion is sanctioned, every deviation becomes reviewable. A trader can look back at any trade and objectively discern whether they took appropriate action.
Overall it was a fantastic and thought-provoking discussion. Check it out here if you haven’t caught the episode yet: Watch the Video.
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