Apiary Fund – Can Personality Traits Help Make You a Better Investor?
Today I participated in Apiary Fund’s new Investor Profile released today. The profile is a personality assessment tool designed to help investors recognize personal characteristics beneficial or detrimental to their investment strategies. (Take the Investor Profile quiz here: http://www.theinvestorprofile.com)
After participating in the profile, I found I am an Analytical – Intuitive. On the surface, I’m not exactly certain what that means. The profile, however, tells you what your profile specifically signifies to you in relationship to your investment style and personality. In the result section of the profile, it says this about me in the “How You See Yourself” section:
“You are easygoing, even-tempered and calm and you project a relaxed, confident air about yourself. These attributes reflect well in the trading markets because it allows you to approach the market in an objective manner even when the current market environment is changing quickly. Your even-tempered manner makes it easy to be persistent in the face of opposition, even when the markets are going against you. It helps you keep working and perfecting your skill to achieve higher levels of success. You don’t allow stress to get to you and are very self-confident in your abilities.
“Personally, you are friendly, kind and cordial, and you don’t intimidate others. People find it nearly impossible not to like you and often come to you with their problems because you genuinely like them and are willing to listen. Your warmth, sympathy, empathy, and understanding help in such situations to make suggestions in an indirect, inoffensive way. Although you are confident and carry yourself with poise, you also radiate a modesty that prevents you from appearing arrogant to others, and a gentleness that tempers your actions. The persistence that you apply to personal endeavors also applies to your relationships with others; when you want to be somebody’s friend, you work at it until you make it happen.”
It tells me a lot more regarding my analytical – intuitive nature, but I won’t go into that.
The profile states, “Your success in the financial markets has as much to do with your personality as it does your level of expertise. It is important to develop a trading style that is consistent with your natural inherent characteristics. The following is a representation of how you might see yourself in the financial markets.”
The Investor Profile determines the investor’s personality through 28 questions that have them select one of four words with which they most and least identify. Each investor receives a primary and secondary personality type that will help identify their overall profile.
The result combines two of the following four trading personality types:
- Aggressive – Quick to enter a trade, but may exit quickly when a loss appears
- Intuitive – Relies on emotional intuition to get in and out of trades
- Analytical – Analyzes every possible variable before taking action
- Methodical – Likely to trade on a system, not much regard to gains and losses
“There’s no such thing as a ‘bad profile’ for an investor,” said Lucas. “The Investor Profile simply identifies characteristics that each person should know about themselves before they invest. After the assessment the investor can see traits they may need to adjust and how they might respond to market changes.”
After getting the results of the Investor Profile, participants have the option to obtain the Investor Profile eBook by Apiary Fund’s CEO, Shawn Lucas. The eBook goes into more depth about each of the 16 possible profile personality types.