Trading as Mental Warfare

http://www.brettsteenbarger.com/articles.htm - it is word doc at this url under title "Trading as Mental Warfare"

This three elements, then, form the core of training successful traders:
Education – Teaching traders what to look for under different market conditions.
Drilling – Performing regular exercises to build specific skills.
Practice – Rehearsing trading under realistic conditions to assemble the skills into superior performance.

Below are several practical directions for the training of traders:

The creation of multiple what-if scenarios during the trading day - Napoleon advised, “A general-in-chief should ask himself several times in the day, ‘What if the enemy were to appear now in my front, or on my right, or my left?’” By expecting the unexpected, we can create proper schemas for guiding our decisions and actions, taking the advantage of surprise away from the adversary.
asr: for OIL in a week if I pre-pare ahead for scenarios for OIL a) up 4% b) down 4% while s&P/EURO changed only 2% what would I do
- this kind of ahead preparation would have helped to take advantage of 'DUBAI world' panic sell in OIL down by 4% while s&p down 2% on 11/27 Friday ..

Intensive drilling under practice conditions – Nearest neighbor statistical methods are techniques that allow one to identify past markets that are similar to the current market on one or more dimensions. For instance, if today’s market is up in the morning after having risen yesterday afternoon from a five day low, I can query my database for all such days matching this pattern. By paper trading these similar days, I orient myself to the many market maneuvers that can occur under present conditions. The goal is not to predict what the market will do (the typical use of the nearest neighbor methodology), but to identify what the market has done, so that adaptive plans can be formulated for all contingencies.
asr: we need this kind of DB to query for OIL .

Rapid drilling under practice conditions – A soldier trained in survival may be deposited into unfamiliar terrain and then observed to see how well he copes. Rapid observation, orientation, decision, and action is needed so that the soldier will not fall victim to hostile environmental conditions, predators, or enemy action. Similarly, the trader can deposit himself in an unfamiliar market drawn from a historical database and rapidly execute trades. Like Boyd, the trader could issue challenges to the market: put me in a position of disadvantage and I will execute a winning trade within 40 seconds. While beginning traders will no doubt require more than 40 seconds to execute their loops, gradually tightening the time parameters will greatly facilitate the automatization of trading.

Intensive mentoring – While we all admire self-made individuals, the reality is that superior athletes, soldiers, and traders are not created out of thin air. They are the product of years of training and mentoring. Wherever we see superior performance, it is the result of day in and day out teaching, drilling, and practicing. Traders often hope to learn their craft in seminars or through books. They are no more likely to succeed in this hope than concert pianists, chess players, armies, or Olympic athletes. It is the intensity of instruction that facilitates its internalization to the point at which learning is automatic and implicit.