Poker players make the best traders
Why we are building a CandyCrush-style trading platform (yes, you read that right).
Opening note: I intend to write without filter about the joy and the pain of entrepreneurship, based on the lessons learned building my first venture, OhMyGeorge. This is not a story of an overnight success startup making the world a better place, so I suppose you don’t have to believe anything I say or follow any advice I give, but you may want to avoid the mistakes I make. This is how it all started.
Sure enough, it helps to understand how to read a chart, to be able to grasp the mathematical concept behind the technical indicators you use and to know how to perform your own fundamental analysis, but data show the average Joe is right about market directions more than half of the time. So how come most people lose in the long run? As Wall Street Journal’s Jason Zweig rightly and simply puts it:
Investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.
61% of trades were profitable but that the average loss was 70% more important than the average profit. (Trades placed via FXCM over a one-year period on the EUR/USD pair)
Analysing more than 40 million trades, DailyFX quantitative strategist David Rodriguez found out that this asymmetrical value perception leads people to lose more on their losing trades than they make on their winning trades.
On the other hand, traders who had been cutting their losses early and letting their profits run, were found to be 3 times more likely to have a positive balance at the end of that same one-year period.
The takeaway from all this? Trading ain’t so much about being right about up or down, most people can do it, but rather about overcoming your emotions, having a plan and sticking to it.
Why poker players make the best traders?
On top of the resilience to deal with repetitive tasks and the experience to use complex interfaces, poker players also naturally develop over time the ability to perform consistently despite stress and to multi-task, which is the skill set required to become a successful trader.
Realising that trading platforms do not enable beginners (or seasoned investors for that matter) to work on this, we decided to build our own!
Introducing OhMyGeorge, our mobile trading game simulation (in public beta on the AppStore and the PlayStore) that takes the maths away to let you focus on the discovery of your risk profile and the fine tuning of your money management strategy as if you were playing poker. We seriously started to work on it since January 2016, and we intend to gamify your learning curve with a CandyCrush-style level-up system (yes again, you read that right).
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