A short monologue by Sam (Kardec Trader) explaining how implicit bias—subcortical, unconscious beliefs—undermines trading performance. Sam defines implicit bias, gives examples (political polarization, trading hesitation and revenge trading), and urges traders to recognize and retrain these biases via further resources (article, webinar) to handle probability, ambiguity, and uncertainty in markets.
There's a secret that we keep from ourselves. It's just not the industry, the trading industry, that keeps it from us. It's also a secret that our biology keeps from us. And that secret is causing you never to achieve the kind of potential that's possible in trading. You experience it all the time. And that secret in neurobiology is called implicit bias. You think, well, what's that? You can say that implicit bias is the set of assumptions, the biases, the beliefs that lay underneath your conscious mind. That's one way. That's the psychological way. In neurobiology, we'd say it's subcortical, it's happening outside of conscious awareness, and you don't know it. And I want to give you an example of this implicit bias, and we're going to then look at it in trading. The President of the United States, Donald Trump, he has detractors that vehemently despise him. He has loyalists that absolutely think he's the greatest thing in the world. Yet. What's interesting is they did a study recently where they took loyalists and detractors told them the same story about Donald Trump. And what happened is each group, depending on their inherent biases, saw that as proof that either Donald Trump was the greatest thing in the world or he was the. He was the most horrible thing in the world.
Yet when they tried to use logic and reason to talk to these people about the evidence, the more evidence they produced, either way, okay, the good or the bad, the people became more entrenched and their beliefs more stubborn. That's implicit bias. What does that have to do with you and trading? It has everything. Everything. First of all, what I want you to notice is you don't even see this operating. It's a secret. You don't see it operating and causing you to believe one thing despite evidence to the contrary.
Now we go to trading.
Who doesn't want to win? Who doesn't want to be right in trading? Of course you do. Yet there's an implicit bias that goes in and you learn very quickly from the trading account. The trading account is going to give you explicit evidence about your effectiveness, that you bring the biases, the beliefs you bring into trading in act from. Yet do we listen to them? No, we get more entranced. We get harder and harder, harder believing what we need to believe, even though the evidence does not support the performances. That's the implicit bias. And what's interesting is you would never see it happening. You would just simply say, you know something. I know how to trade. I Trade my plans. But then everything falls apart when I start actually trying to trade my plan. So I don't know what happens. You run into this implicit bias that you're not willing to let go of and don't know it. It's a secret to you. You become more entrenched in it and it takes over the mind. And despite proof to the contrary, you keep acting in a self limiting way. Okay, now listen to that. What does that look like in trading? Well, how many people have ever tried to take a, you know, they see the setup, it's a valid setup, it's a good setup, it's an a setup. Yet they look for more confirmation, they don't do it. And it feels good at that moment not taking the trade and it going on by.
That's the implicit bias. And then it goes on buying. You look at what am I doing? Why didn't I take, why didn't I take that trade? Then you're looking at it saying the evidence doesn't fit my actions. Yet in the moment of performance, in the moment of heat, that implicit bias showed up, took over mine and you never saw it coming.
That's the implicit bias. That's the secret that if you want to conquer trading, that's the piece you're going to have to master. You're going to have to master the implicit biases that you don't even know that you're bringing to trading. And then you have to change them. But on the other hand, maybe you're not the person who has a problem with like getting into trades. Maybe when that trade goes against you, you think it's not fair and you're going to get it back and you're going to make, you're going to make the markets pay. We call it revenge trading. What's the implicit bias that keeps having you do that?
That's the trick. Friends, it's not you. You know, if you had, if you had the ability, you would just be able to say, okay, I see that and I'm going to rectify that, I'm going to correct that. But it's at the level of subcortical, of unconscious bias. You don't see it. The body sees it, the flesh sees it. And for short term survival being right is really important, yet long term it doesn't serve you.
This is the big secret that everyone's going to have to master if they're going to convert the mind that they brought to trading. Built for a time and a place far, far away from now of a survival time. Of dangerous time and build it into a mind.
That can handle probability, that can handle the ambiguity found in trading. The brain hates that ambiguity. It hates uncertainty. And it wants to leap onto that implicit bias so that it can feel right again. The problem is the certainty of that feeling.
Clouds you. And you don't see that the beliefs and the biases that are driving your action is leading you to destruction, or at least to where you're not achieving what you know you can achieve. Friends, that's the biggest conundrum in trading. Few people ever get beyond that. If you want to learn more about this, go to my website, really start looking, read the article associated with this video and start digging down and saying, well, what are my implicit biases? How are they operating? How can I learn to see them? Come to the webinar. Start really digging, and decide whether or not you want to become the trader that you could be or whether or not you want to be right.
That's where it's stuck. That's where you have to open the door to change. Force the brain into change, into changing into something that's adaptive by design rather than natural selection. Come and learn, friends. Come and learn. Thank you.
Sam.
