Psychological Warfare

We traded another two top football matches this week and we did very well out of them thank you. The Liverpool V Benfica match I’ll cover at a later date.

Chelsea V Barcelona was billed as the match of the year so far, but from a spectator point of view failed to deliver. In the end. Barcelona playing in front of their own crowd showed what they are worth by closing Chelsea down at every single opportunity. Their brilliance showed through further when the proved to have enough fire power left in store despite their blocking tactics to be able to snatch an opportunistic and brilliant goal.

Chelsea tried everything in their psychological satchel to unsettle Barcelona including keeping them waiting in the tunnel, slapping several of the Barcelona players on the back in the most friendly way and bombarding us with the usual pre-match bundle of press reports, reaction and counter reaction. As traders we must be aware that psychological war fare is the order of the day in what we do for a living both off and on the pitch and more importantly on our trading screens. What used to be a working mans Saturday afternoon ‘thing’ has become a playground for the richest men in the world - the pitch the arena for epic clashes of the titans. Indeed if Football is your poison then you have been born lucky just look at the talent and the quality of matches on offer. It’s like eating chocolate cake made in heaven nearly every day of the week and I haven’t even mentioned the World Cup yet..

The point is though that Barcelona didn’t budge they were not unsettled and Chelsea went home empty handed. And the lesson for us traders is that you need to be aware of what the market or what trading will throw at you. Take Barcelona as your example in how to handle things. Take the pain that is thrown at you and so long as the pain has previously been calculated that it is worth taking, concentrate on the job in hand and put it all down to part of the trading game.

How did all this affect the readers of my Trading Post? It is not a secret that we were looking for a Barcelona win, but that our strategy allowed us to trade out once the goal had been scored.

Where was our psychological pain then?  The pain was in seeing after a very short length of time that Barcelona were slowing Chelsea and that the game looked very quickly like it could be 0-0. Holding a position where you expect Barcelona to take the lead based on your pre-match analysis and then seeing them block everything down doesn’t make Jack a happy Betfair trader. The pain was in the wait, it was in the trade which came very close to the point where we said, “This trade is one of our few losers so we cut before the damage gets too bad and we cut according to our game plan” And it was in the sticking to your game plan whatever the situation, not cutting too soon nor too late.  But the initial analysis proved right and Barcelona scored. When the goal finally came, what a brilliant goal it was.

So it wasn’t only Mourihnio who was playing psychological games last Tuesday it was the trading game as well - playing games with us traders.

If you would like to talk trading then drop me a line.

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