A Personality Questionnaire for Traders

Recent research highlights the role of our emotional experience in our health, well-being, and job performance.

The following questionnaire asks you to assess your emotional experience during your trading. Specifically, you'll be rating how often you've experienced the following feelings over the past two weeks.

Please use the following scale for your responses:

1 = rarely
2 = occasionally
3 = sometimes
4 = often
5 = most of the time


1) I feel happy when I'm trading _____
2) I feel stressed when I'm trading _____
3) I feel alert and energetic when I'm trading _____
4) I feel discouraged when I'm trading _____
5) I feel capable of succeeding at my trading _____
6) I blame myself when my trading doesn't work out _____
7) I feel satisfied with my trading results _____
8) I feel edgy and frustrated when I'm trading _____
9) I feel in control of what happens in my trading _____
10) I make impulsive decisions when I'm trading _____



SCORING

Add the scores for the odd items. That is your positive emotional experience score: _____
Add the scores for the even items. That is your negative emotional experience score: ____


The ratio of your positive to negative experience is one of the most important psychological contributors to your trading performance.

In general, it's ideal to see the positive item score meaningfully higher than the negative item score--a 2:1 ratio is quite favorable. If the negative item score equals or exceeds the score for the positive items, it suggests a relative imbalance in emotional experience.
If your positive experience nicely exceeds your negative experience, you have a normal, healthy emotional temperature. If the reverse, you have a kind of emotional fever; trading, in such cases, is not contributing to your well-being as a person.

Markets are continuously changing. Their trends change, as do their patterns of volatility. Even the best-researched mechanical trading systems degrade over time. For this reason, traders are continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning market patterns. Their survival crucially depends upon their ability to sustain states of enhanced learning. Surely this is the great emotional challenge for traders: to sustain well-being even during those trading slumps when markets are shifting and playing havoc with our pattern recognition.