What Type of Trader Are You?

Took a personality test from: http://tharptradertest.com/

I am a...

Supportive Trader

You tend to focus on the details of life, seeing what needs to be done and doing it in a conscientious manner. You take your responsibilities very seriously and you are very dependable, practical and realistic. At the same time, you strongly value security and stability. You tend not to be a risk taker, but you could see yourself as an investor as long as you had a structure to work under.

You tend to gather information about people and use it to support them because you make others feel good about themselves. You are very people oriented, and you probably do not like abstract ideas, concepts or theories. However, since trading tends to be an isolated and relatively lonely profession you might find that it's not for you simply because there is not enough social interaction.

You probably have definite values and a clear idea of how things "should be." And when things are not the way you like them to be, you’ll probably tell people. However, you tend to adapt community standards for what is right and wrong, rather than trusting your own internal values. This might be disastrous for you as a trader/investor where being a non-conformist tends to lead to success.

Trading Strengths

1. Your creativity often comes from flashes of insight into the nature of things or the needs of people.
2. You can probably work very effectively among a team of like minded supportive traders.
3. With a careful selection process to help you feel secure, you should be able to work with simple, clear systems that manage risk and don’t aim to go for outsized returns in dynamic conditions. Probably very comfortable with clear, calm all-season trading plans.

Trading Challenges

1. You have an aversion to risk and have trouble taking socially adverse trades, even if it could make you big profits. This could eliminate a lot of options for you in trading.
2. Probably have trouble understanding concepts like how the markets really work and how to evaluate a low risk trading idea.
3. If you have an action oriented part you may jump into the markets too rapidly.

Example Trader: Andrew Carnegie

Andrew Carnegie rose from a poor Scottish immigrant worker to become the second richest man of his era (next to John Rockefeller). He parlayed some wise investments into a $40,000 investment that he used to buy a farm which turned into a million dollar oil landfall the very next year. He invested that fortune in steel and newspapers. His company was eventually bought out by J.P. Morgan and became U.S. Steel. And once Cargnegie retired, he proceeded to give away over $300 million before his death. Here is Carnegie's philosophy:

"Man does not live by bread alone. I have known millionaires starving for lack of the nutriment which alone can sustain all that is human in man, and I know workmen, and many so-called poor men, who revel in luxuries beyond the power of those millionaires to reach. It is the mind that makes the body rich. There is no class so pitiably wretched as that which possesses money and nothing else. Money can only be the useful drudge of things immeasurably higher than itself. My aspirations take a higher flight. Mine be it to have contributed to the enlightenment and the joys of the mind, to the things of the spirit, to all that tends to bring into the lives of the toilers of Pittsburgh sweetness and light. I hold this the noblest possible use of wealth."

In 1908, he commissioned (at no pay) Napoleon Hill, then a journalist, to interview more than 500 high and wealthy achievers to find out the common threads of their success. Hill eventually became a Carnegie collaborator, and their work was published in 1928, after Carnegie's death, in Hill's book The Law of Success and in 1937 in Hill's most successful and enduring work, Think and Grow Rich.

He was generally known to be warm hearted, conscientious, and very cooperative. And you, like Carnegie, want harmony around you and you work hard to accomplish it.