The Strategic Trader

The next psychological trader profile from Van K. Tharp’s personality types is the Strategic Trader.

According to Dr. Tharp, this trader type is one of just two trader profiles that have the highest likelihood of becoming great professional traders.

Strategic Trader Qualities

Strategic Traders tend to focus on knowledge, intelligence and being competent. When taken together, these represent great qualities in a trader.

This Strategic Trader personality type also manifests the three core qualities essential to becoming a great trader. These are:

1. The ability to see and understand the big picture, along with what connections and possibilities exist
2. The ability to make decisions based on logic and solid analysis, and
3. The ability to be orderly, decisive and to do things in sequential order.

Other qualities which the Strategic Trader tends to embody include: the ability to think quickly, being an avid learner and having the intelligence necessary to easily grasp complex and abstract theories.

Many successful Strategic Traders are also masters of conceptual and analytical thinking.

Trading Strengths

The Strategic Trader is usually quick to see patterns and opportunities necessary to generate low risk trading ideas with high rewards.

They tend to have originality and drive, as well as a desirable facility for devising and implementing trading and business plans.

In addition, Strategic Traders will generally understand long and short term position taking, and they typically aim to be the best and to associate only with the best.

Trading Challenges

Letting emotions sneak up on them and affect their trading performance negatively can present a challenge to the Strategic Trader.

In addition, Strategic traders have a tendency to want to be right all the time — sometimes to the point of perfectionism. This may impede them from trading as they waste time searching for a better system.

This powerful desire to be right can also lead the Strategic Trader into the pitfall of canceling or changing their stop loss levels in the erroneous thinking that their original trading idea was correct.