TRADERS´ English I November 2013 - page 6

COVERSTORY
6
11.2013
What You Can Learn from Professional Athletes
Triathlon is a race of three sports made up of swimming, cycling, and running. In a sense, any investment also includes three
disciplines: saving, investing, and trading. And just as in triathlon, the third discipline is the hardest – and the one that is key
at the same time. But these are by no means all the parallels between trading and triathlon: Both are very individual, the
principles of success are similar, and whether you make it or not will in the end be determined by your mind set. Our deputy
editor Marko Graenitz has subjected himself to the brutal rigours of preparing for the Ironman competition. Having conducted
numerous interviews with traders in the past few years, he has discovered a lot of parallels between trading and triathlon. Get
ready for an exciting and intriguing comparison. Ready, steady, go!
Trading vs. Triathlon
Triathlon is a young sport that has become increasingly
popular in recent years. A triathlon competition consists
of the three disciplines of swimming, cycling, and running
that are completed one right after the other. There are
competitions over a variety of distances, ranging from
the classic sprint distance over a 0.75 km swim, a 20 km
bike ride, and a 5 km run. Longer competitions include the
Olympic distance (1.5 / 40 / 10), and Half Ironman (1.9 / 90 /
21). The longest and best-known event is the Ironman (3.8 /
180 / 42), which was first held on Hawaii in 1978.To this day,
the annual Ironman World Championships take place there,
most recently on 12th October 2013.
Triathlon and Ironman
»
Many Roads Lead to Roth
At first glance, any comparison between trading and
triathlon seems far-fetched. When you trade you sit in
front of a computer, whereas you swim, cycle, and run
when you do a triathlon. In that respect, the two things
could hardly be any more different. But in order for
a trader to learn something from triathlon, it is not the
physical differences at all that matter but the principles –
and these show surprising parallels.
In trading as in triathlon, there are many individually
different paths that can lead to success. In trading, there
are, for example, the trend-following method, mean
reversion and arbitrage trading. The paths could not be
more different either: besides the trader who has gone
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