AlphaMind Podcast 55: Dr Tara Swart; On 'Brain Agility' and being 'the Wendy Rhodes of London'.

This week we are delighted to have Dr Tara Swart on the Podcast. Tara is a qualified psychiatrist and neuroscientist. who left the world of medicine to set-up her own Neuroscience based leadership coaching consultancy and became a coach, working with leaders and increasingly with top traders in Hedge Funds. Tara also lectures in Neuroscience at MIT, is an in-demand speaker, and author of ‘The Source: Open Your Mind, Change Your Life', which has been has described very favourably as ‘The Secret' based on Science, and by some as Life-changing. The Source has become a UK best seller, and is now being translated into 36 different languages.

Tara’s work with Hedge Funds has seen her described as the ‘Wendy Rhodes of London’. For those of you unfamiliar with Wendy Rhodes, she was the Psychology Coach in the Primetime hit show ‘Billions’.

In this episode we had a great discussion about Tara's book ‘The Source’, and expanded this out to explore how traders can develop an ‘AlphaMind’ by developing their ‘Brain Agility’. Brain agility facilitates the mastering of your emotions, developing greater resilience, being aware of the brain-body connection, accessing your intuitive abilities, making good logical decisions, staying motivated and thinking creatively.

This conversation is laced with references to neuroscience, psychology, emotions and references to our cognitive abilities allied to how people think about and make decisions in risk, trading and investment situations.

One of the fascinating parts of this interview was a talk about a topic rarely discusses, but that we see often as a factor in people's behaviours as traders, inter-generational trauma. This is part of the field of epigenetics, which is the influence of the environment on the expression of our genes. The point of this is that trauma’s experienced by parents and even grandparents can influence and shape how we are and how we behave when taking and managing risk and plays out subtly in people's work as traders. Tara makes that point that we do have the capability through Neuro-Plasticity to override this and take back control.

We also discuss later in the episode how fear and anxiety play out and how there are behaviours which can allow us to better a get a handle on these elements.

Listen to a soundbite from this episode 

You can find out more about Tara on her website https://www.taraswart.com/.

You can also read the Spear Magazine Article which Tara refers to later in the interview at this link: https://www.spearswms.com/stop-work-killing/

Another great article worth a read mentioned by Tara was Ghosts in the Executive Suite : https://syncreticsgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/Ghosts-in-the-Executive-Suite-2-26-16.pdf

Tara is married to Robin Bieber, one of the world’s leading technical analysts and a guest a few podcasts earlier.

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The AlphaMind Podcast

The AlphaMind podcast is co-hosted by Steven Goldstein and Mark Randall, market veterans with over seven decades between them in the financial markets. The podcast delves into the lives and stories of extraordinary guests whose experiences provide a fresh and powerful lens through which to understand the mental, emotional, psychological and behavioural challenges people face when encountering risk and uncertainty in financial markets. To find out more visit the AlphaMind podcast website. The AlphaMind Podcast is produced in partnership with 'The Society of Technical Analysts'.

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Our powerful Trader Performance Coaching Programme focuses on helping people develop and improve the key risk skills, abilities and mindsets which contribute to trading performance mastery.

This programme makes use of our unique and powerful ‘Human Alpha Performance Model’ which helps illuminate the human aspects of the risk process as people navigate their way through the Financial Markets. The model helps people make sense of their behaviours when taking and managing risk in the financial markets, whilst the coaching helps people to make key changes and adjustments which drives growth in risk capability and personal performance.

This programme has been delivered over the past 10 years to people at many of the world’s leading trading and investment firms.

Click here to find our more about the programme, or email info@alpharcubed.com.

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We work with many businesses in the Trading and Investment Industry to help them and their people improve their 'Risk Capability'. Our clients are some of the leaders in the trading world, including names such as Bank of America, Cargill, RBS, Balyasny Asset Management amongst many others. If you would be interested to know more about us and how we could help your business. Please email steven.goldstein@alpharcubed.com. 

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What you see is often what you 'think' you see, not what you really see!!!

As a trader coach and someone involved in trading psychology education, I often come across simple but well meaning advice given to traders. Whilst I appreciate the good intentions in imparting these nuggets of wisdom, I often find that these nuggets are in reality somewhat banal and meaningless (In fact I often wonder whether many of these people have really traded for a living or run risk - and in many cases it turns out they haven't). 

As an example: One very common piece of advice is : 'Trade What You See, Not What You Think'.

It sound like good sensible advice, and on the face of it, who would argue with it. - But the problem is we don't actually see what we see, rather we see what we 'think' we see. - If you are confused at this stage I don't blame you, but try and stay with me just a little longer. 

I am going to provide a little example of what I mean here; together with a little explanation from the world of Neuroscience.

Take a look at this shape, I am sure you are familiar with this particular illusion or one of its many variants. Much as you look at it, and contemplate it, your intellect tells you that this is impossible, you could not physically build it, but your brain is still telling you that you are basically seeing a cuboid shape.
This happens because we see with our brain and not our eyes. Neuroscience research has found that there are 10 times more neurons (The basic building blocks of your nervous system) going to the eye from the brain, than there are going the other way from your eye to the brain. Your brain receives light from the eye, but its the brain that makes it up into something coherent. Interestingly, the eye actually throws away much of the information it gets, leaving it to the brain to fill in additional information in its own ways. And here is the crux, the brain zooms in on templates from past experience, and is doing this on auto-pilot, you are not even aware of it. - Hence in this example, much as you know that is impossible, your brain still sees a cuboid.  

Just to add to this, our cortex, the outer layer and newest part of the brain, which in humans is vast and gives us the ability to abstract and rationalise; is scanning for similarities between the immediate situation we observe, and our stored experiences. Hence when you read a sentence such as this one: 

Aoccdrnig to a rescherear at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae.

You will almost certainly read it correctly as:

According to a researcher at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word appear. The only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. 

The reason you were most probably able to read the jumbled sentence, is we use context to activate the area of our brain that signals what we expect next. - It is the same with hearing, if we hear a sound that leads us to believe another sound will follow, the brain acts as if we’re already hearing the second sound. - Our brains draw the same conclusions with words and letters. It is possible that you did not get every single word correct when reading a jumbled sentence or passage but will believe they did because the brain will subconsciously go back and fill in any gaps in your knowledge based on the subsequent context. One final little example for you:

 Read out loud the text inside the triangle below:

Almost certainly you said 'A Bird in the Bush' ?

Try it again -  Still 'A Bird in Bush'? --


This time put your finger over the word 'The' and read it again?

I am sure you have it now - The word 'The' appear twice, but almost certainly most of you have missed seeing 'the' twice. - This merely emphasizes what I have written above.


- Is it any wonder that trading sometimes is such a difficult task?

I will leave it at that for now, however for those of you trading on the Non-Farms this afternoon, best of luck, and 'be careful what you see, or what you think you see'.


If you would be interested to know more about my work a as a 'Trader Psychology Coach' and  'Trader Performance Coach', and how we can help you or your colleagues to become a more effective in your job, please feel free to contact me at sgoldstein@bgtedge.com or visit our our website at www.bgtedge.com.