Trader Psychology Quotes

When traders were able to earn a million dollars, of which base pay was $150,000 to $200,000 and the rest was bonus, they would go for it. Now if you're sitting there earning $600,000, you become less risk-seeking. And if you have less risk-seeking, the ability of the market to be incredibly volatile is increased.

Remember this: When you are doing nothing, those speculators who feel they must trade day in and day out, are laying the foundation for your next venture. You will reap benefits from their mistakes.

If I am a trader, and I know you have got ample stocks, why should I buy?

The men on the trading floor may not have been to school, but they have Ph.D.’s in man’s ignorance.

That was how a Salomon bond trader thought: He forgot whatever it was that he wanted to do for a minute and put his finger on the pulse of the market. If the market felt fidgety, if people were scared or desperate, he herded them like sheep into a corner, then made them pay for their uncertainty. He sat on the market until it puked gold coins. Then he worried about what he wanted to do.

A good trader has to have three things: a chronic inability to accept things at face value, to feel continuously unsettled, and to have humility.

It doesn't matter whether the market is up or down. All the day traders want is volatility.

The three traits speculators must learn to manage within themselves are confidence, fear, and aggressiveness.

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

Never ask a trader if he is profitable: you can easily see it in his gesture and gait.

Fear and hope remain the same; therefore the study of the psychology of speculators is as valuable as it ever was. Weapons change, but strategy remains strategy, on the New York Stock Exchange as on the battlefield. I think the clearest summing up of the whole thing was expressed by Thomas F. Woodlock when he declared: “The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past.”