--- title: "Strategy: the glasses you see the market through" slug: "strategy-is-your-glasses" kind: "ACADEMY" category: "personal-trading-strategy" locale: "en" canonical: "https://app.forecastcity.com/academy/personal-trading-strategy/strategy-is-your-glasses" published: "2026-10-13T00:09:14.198Z" updated: "2026-10-13T00:09:14.198Z" description: "Why copying a trader's strategy rarely works for you, and what research on personality and trading results says about choosing your own method." --- # Strategy: the glasses you see the market through A strategy works only in the hands of someone it fits. In this lesson you will see why, and what research has found about personality and trading. Picture an Olympic shooter. Their glasses have the best lenses and the most expensive frame. The lenses were ground for their own eyes. Now put the same glasses on. After two minutes everything blurs and your head starts to ache. Nothing is wrong with the glasses, and they work perfectly for their owner. **Their lenses were made for someone else's eyes.** A trading strategy is also a pair of glasses: you see the market through it. The strategy of a YouTuber, an Instagram teacher or a Telegram channel was made for that person's eyes: for their **time**, **capital**, **patience** and **nerves**. When you copy that strategy exactly as it is, the market blurs for you. Entries seem to come too late, you move your stop loss, and every trade feels more stressful than the one before. No ready-made signal from a channel is your pair of glasses either. No signal is made for your eyes. ## The wrong question: "What is the best strategy in the world?" Asking this is like asking which glasses are the best in the world. The answer depends on your eyes. Are you short-sighted or long-sighted? Do you need the glasses for reading or for driving at night? The market works the same way. A scalper who decides every few seconds and an investor who looks at the chart once a week need two completely different pairs of glasses. The right question is this: what is my prescription, and which strategy matches it? An optician examines your eyes before making any pair of glasses. In trading, you also need to examine yourself first. [The ten-question trader self-test]() in lesson 5 is that eye exam. ## What research says about personality and trading In 2005, Andrew Lo, Dmitry Repin and Brett Steenbarger measured the emotions of 80 day traders every day for five weeks. Then they compared those emotions with the traders' results. They found no particular personality profile of a successful trader. Their other finding was clearer. Traders who reacted more strongly to gains and to losses alike had weaker trading results. Put the two findings together and you can conclude that **success is not tied to one particular personality**. What matters is a method that causes the least emotional strain for your own personality. In 2008, Cliff Mayfield and his colleagues showed that personality affects a person's time horizon. More extraverted people were more likely to intend to invest for the short term. People who become anxious sooner, or who are more risk-averse, stayed away from short-term investing. In the same study, people who are open to new experiences leaned more towards long-term investing. Jack Schwager has interviewed the world's best traders for years and wrote the well-known Market Wizards series. In his book Hedge Fund Market Wizards he gathered the lessons of those interviews. One of them is this: **find a method that fits your own personality**. Brett Steenbarger, a psychologist who has coached professional traders for years, says the same thing from another angle. In his words, people take in and make sense of information in different ways. Many traders do not use their own mental strengths.