Just completed a test to determine my "investor profile"... take these tests with a 'grain of salt'. The answers can vary depending upon your mood at the time of the test, and this can influence the investor profile determined for you. Enjoy!
How You See Yourself
Your success in the financial markets has as much to do with your personality as it does your level of expertise. It is important to develop a trading style that is consistent with your natural inherent characteristics. The following is a representation of how you might see yourself in the financial markets.
You possess a rigidly independent, results-oriented nature; you push hard to achieve your goals and are truly comfortable only when you are acting entirely on your own. You also have the ability to look at any situation, problem or opportunity from an objective, neutral perspective. These characteristics make you ideally suited to the financial markets and making your own investment decisions. Your results-oriented nature manifests itself in a solid work ethic and leads you to constantly seek ways to improve your performance and efficiency in anything you do; this also works to your benefit as an investor. You are able to analyze your investment results in an objective, rational manner and identify your strengths and weaknesses as well as the things you need to do to improve.
You attack problems with tenacity and keep at it with a single-minded determination until you have found the solution. When approaching any problem or situation, you look for quick results and solutions, but are careful not to do so recklessly. You carefully explore all options, possibilities and angles available to you in order to make sure you get the results you need. You will never sacrifice quality or thoroughness in favor of quick result, because your confidence in your ability to organize and analyze information effectively has worked so well for you in the past. In investing, these characteristics give you an open mind to new information, trading techniques and strategies that you can use to your long-term benefit, while helping you master those techniques and strategies in such a way that you can manage your risk as much as possible.
From a personal standpoint, you are the type of person who doesn't speak often, but when you do, people listen. You display patience and reserve with others, listening to them and considering information they give you carefully before you speak. When you do speak, you communicate your thoughts easily and effectively. These characteristics, coupled with your confidence in your own abilities, make you one of those rare people who can dominate and lead in a quiet way.
Basic Desires and Motivations
Your basic desires and motivations drive your abilities and performance in the financial markets. Learn to use your motivations to your benefit as you develop trading rules and system that are unique to your trading style.
You are a well-organized person; that characteristic applies to everything you do and is reflected in the environment you maintain around you. Keeping your things in their properly established order helps you project a controlled, reserved image to others. You prefer to organize and order things in your own way, and you find that the suggestions of others almost never fit the way you prefer to do it. You are careful to make sure to have enough information to drawn your own conclusions and make your own decisions. Your penchant for organization is an effective tool in your investing, since the proper organization of the information you must track and analyze on a daily basis is critical to your immediate and long-term success.
Your attention to organization and order helps you to finish the projects you start. You have a driving desire to complete tasks and projects quickly and correctly. You also view the desire to complete a task quickly to be of equal importance with your desire to get the job done right. This sometimes makes it difficult for you to strike a balance between the two desires, and you are often torn over which desire is more important in a given situation. As a trader, this difficulty can be seem during periods when the market is changing quickly and the strategies you have been using no longer work, which requires you to quickly analyze the market and determine what you have to do to adjust. Your desire to adjust quickly to the market has to be tempered by the need to make sure you make the right adjustment.
Your preference for the way you organize and do things means that you also prefer to take on new projects alone and to assume the sole responsibility for their completion. You believe that taking care of things yourself is the best way to achieve the best and most accurate result possible. You take particular satisfaction and enjoyment in the challenge of difficult problems, particularly when active fact investigation is required. Conversely, when problems become tedious, drawn out, or seemingly pointless, you lose interest.
Although you can work well in groups, you have a natural skepticism of others and tend to want only bottom-line information from those around you; supporting details mean very little and hold next to no interest for you.
Behaviour Under Pressure
We are constantly under the influence of the pressure to perform--whether subtle or overt. As traders, this pressure can come from outside influences, but often comes from ourselves. This pressure, from time to time, can affect our normal behavior. The markets oscillate between periods of relative calm and wildly volatile. Your ability to perform under pressure will directly influence the outcome of any given trade. People respond to these pressures in different ways. Here is how you typically perform under pressure:
When the pressure is on, your rigid independence becomes more and more prevalent. You want to be in control and don't like to be told what to do. Your driving motivations when stress increases become completely task-oriented; you focus on getting your tasks done as quickly and as well as you can. Your desire to get things done as quickly as possible keeps you moving at a very fast pace, but the speed of your work is checked by the equally strong desire to produce the highest quality results possible. When these motivations are balanced in a high-pressure environment, you produce your best results. As an investor, this balance gives you the ability to analyze and adjust to the market quickly and effectively, making razor-sharp judgments about the best, most profitable strategies and techniques to employ at the time.
You have extreme confidence in your ability to analyze information you are give and to organize your tasks according to that information in the most efficient way possible, which feeds your preference to work alone. Deep down, you simply believe that there aren't any questions that you can't find the answers to when you are allowed to organize things your way and can examine the information you need and analyze it the way that serves you best. You can then draw your own conclusions and make your own decisions. You ability to come up with solutions to the most difficult problems gives you a great sense of satisfaction and a high level of confidence that you are right almost all of the time.
Under normal circumstances, you prefer to interact with others only when the situation demands it. It is easier for you to as much as possible by yourself. In some ways, you view associates as tools for you to employ to get your job done. You don't feel this way in a cold, insensitive manner; you merely like to view things from a standpoint of the work that needs to get done. Under pressure, these tendencies become even more marked and prevalent. Under stress, you become skeptical of others and even distrustful of their abilities to a far greater degree than you would in normal circumstances. Because of your skepticism, it is very difficult for you to share the responsibility for any of your work with anyone you don't know well.
Your driving motivations to get the job done quickly and with the highest quality possible make it difficult for you to give your time at work to others unless you are between tasks. Your confidence in the conclusions and decisions you make is so strong that you become stubborn in defending yourself when somebody questions them. You also feel such a strong sense of ownership of the ideas and opinions that you have developed that have a difficult time relinquishing them.
Possible Need for Improvement
While every investor profile has unique characteristics that compliment trading, you also share challenges. Here are a couple of area's that may improve your trading.
Your natural suspicion of other's intentions and skepticism of their abilities makes you somewhat guarded by nature. This is an attitude that can make you appear to be distrustful to others. This attitude manifests itself in your intense dislike for delegating tasks or portions of your work to others. It is difficult for you to trust that others will perform to the high standards you hold yourself to, so you don't like handing over any part of the projects you take on to anybody else. Your particular method of going about your work and organizing things your way feeds the belief that no one else can complete your tasks or projects the way you would. Your ability to focus and concentrate completely on the task at hand keeps you from adequately displaying your ability to interact with people, which adds to the perception that you are guarded and distrustful to those around you. Remember that even the semi-solitary world of investing, interacting with others and learning from their experiences can help you be a better investor and open the doors to new ways to invest and make money you may not have thought of.
Your confidence and sense of ownership can work against you as an investor since when the markets work against you, you may not be able to admit that the conclusions you made to lead you into a bad investment may have been wrong. You need to remember that others also have valuable thoughts and ideas and that there exists the possibility that they are right and you are wrong.
Ideas for Better Performance
Here are a few high impact suggestions that might improve your success in the financial markets. Do not worry about changing these characteristics, it often enough just to learn to recognize when they are affecting your investment outcomes.
Ask More, Tell Less - Your natural tendency is to tell people what to do. Try asking instead; just changing a few words that you say can make your requests much less intimidating.
Allow Others to Express Opinions - This can be a problem when you are under stress. Think about the people around you and when they want to express themselves, give them an opening.
Avoid Arrogance - Overly assertive behavior can be seen by some as arrogance. Avoid it completely by taking the time to consider the needs of others.
Be Open Minded to Alternatives - Be sure to listen to the ideas of others from an objective standpoint; they will sometimes see things that you don't.
Adapt to the Time Needs of Others - You want things done immediately if not sooner, but others might want to take more time to accomplish the tasks they've been given. Give them what they need.
Allow Others to Assume Leadership - Your tendency to take charge in every situation can frustrate others. Step back from time to time and give someone else the opportunity to be in control.
Control Less - Remember that you don't have to be in control of the situation all the time. There's no need to overextend yourself; relax your control from time to time.
Verbalize Your Feelings - Don't be afraid to relate personal feelings that you have. Doing so will strengthen relationships and help establish trust.
Socialize More, Use Small Talk - Make your conversations more personal and enjoyable.
Build Relationships - Some people won't function effectively without some kind of personal interaction. Take the time to work on your personal relationships.
Make Sincere Compliments - Don't give any half-hearted attempts, some people can spot artificiality and will be turned off completely. Making sincere compliments will generate good feelings and can go a long way to establishing better relationships.
Make Friendly Gestures - Use your hands: open up and squeeze a shoulder, pat a wrist, or even hug if appropriate to relationship and setting. These personal gestures serve as positive physical feedback.
Be More of a People Person - Concentrate on the relationships you have with those around you and less on the mechanics of completing your tasks.
Be Flexible - Don't be so rigid in your thinking that you won't even consider another course of action or another idea. A little flexibility will smooth over many personal conflicts.
Relax Physically and Mentally - Take a deep breath from time to time and just think about something else for a minute. Get up and walk around, talk to people about the little things, and just detach yourself from your tasks every once in a while.
Investor Profile by Shawn T. Lucas
