There's now a game to make you a better trader

Trader Brain Exercise

What makes a good trader? Mathematical ability, innate intuition or people skills?

Is it something you are born with or something you can learn?

Bloomberg Tradebook, Bloomberg’s global agency brokerage business, has partnered with risk and trading psychology practice, The ReThink Group, to put together a tool they say helps traders sharpen their skills.

The Trader Brain Exercise launched on Wednesday, July 6, and can be accessed on the Bloomberg terminal (TBX Go) or on the web.

Denise Shull is the founder of The ReThink Group, which offers performance coaching to traders and portfolio managers, and is the brains behind this exercise. She was one of the consultants for the performance coach character in Showtime’s Billions drama and is an expert in neuropsychology and behavioral finance.

The exercise displays a series of videos that depict the movement of shapes. Traders study each scene and then anticipate the direction of the shapes’ next move. The ability to do this successfully correlates to the traders’ skills in predicting short-term movements in price, according to the creators.

The game is based on a study at the California Institute of Technology, published in the Journal of Finance in 2010.

Trader Brain ExerciseEntitled, “Exploring the Nature of ‘Trader Intuition’”, the study found that the skill in predicting price changes in markets is more strongly connected with Theory of Mind, or the ability to predict other people, than mathematical skill. 

Traders think about the markets in a human way, Shull told Business insider. Behind every price movement, there is a person, and traders aren’t even conscious that they think this way.

“Markets masquerade as a math game when it’s really a people prediction game,” Shull told Business Insider.

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