by Ken Long

There is general agreement that Ted Williams was the greatest hitter in the entire history of baseball.

He brought a science to the practice of hitting, a commitment to the informed practice of his craft, a deep understanding of his strengths and weaknesses as a hitter. These combined with his natural physical ability to produce a hitter whose like will probably not be seen again.

I want to focus on his approach to hitting and his keen insights to his craft which i think directly apply to our craft of trading.

Williams studied every at bat and every swing, and developed a matrix of his personal strike zone which showed what his average was in every region. His strike zone measured 7 baseballs wide by 11 baseballs tall. Knowing his average for each of these areas helped him abide by his first rule of hitting: swing at good pitches. If you chase bad pitches then that's what you will get from professional pitchers.

He advised that you also had to do your homework: preparation gets your mind right. I equate this to our preparation phase of trading, which includes knowing the market classification, the patterns that are working, the oversold or overbought condition in the short term, and the specific volatility statistics of the market and our preferred targets.

Williams' final piece of top level advice was to be quick with the bat. Being quick in action means you can wait a bit longer to commit, you will be fooled less, and you will be more confident in your execution.

We can apply this advice by streamlining our decision making process by rehearing, by reducing our required information to the minimum needed to act, and by anticipating events in order to have a plan of action worked out ahead of time.

It's remarkable how similar the keys to high performance really are between different fields of human effort.