Tharp made trader profiling his life work, buy a book written by him and/or take this test to see of your personality fits the markets: Tharp Trader Test - Enable Cookies

Ryanb 

Tharp made trader profiling his life work, buy a book written by him and/or take this test to see of your personality fits the markets: Tharp Trader Test - Enable Cookies

This is a great reference, thanks for sharing!

MetalTrade 

Ask them how many accounts they have blown. I never met a successful trader who didn't blown at least a few accounts, or went into bankruptcy a few times.

I have met many who never blew an account and never went into bankruptcy. From the day I started trading professionally, which was April 16, 1986, through today, the most I was ever debit from trading (that is, debit from my starting account size) was about $300. That's not to say that I have not had big losses; I've had very big losses But my account size, built up over years, and my ability to recover made occasional large losses acceptable. I had bigger problems in the beginning managing expenses and not initially planning for taxes.

In the case of other traders I've known, most of the ones who never blew out had backing and training and were conservative by nature. They were prop group employees who later went independent. And we were all trading in a venue, the exchange floor, where the odds favored us as long as we worked to earn the bid/ask spread. The guys who blew up in spectacular fashion did not respect the market.

dutchbookmaker 

Talk about spurious correlation...geez. If alot of traders are athletes I imagine it has far more to do with being ultra competitive than with actually being an athlete. Surely though traders come in all shapes and sizes but it doesn't even make sense to even think in terms of a non competitive trader .Without a borderline psychotic will to win you have almost no chance of not dropping out.

I agree with this analysis. I've met successful traders who were not athletic, but I can't think of a successful trader among the hundreds I've known who was not very very competitive. Many of the pit traders I've known had athletic backgrounds, some had financial backgrounds and others worked their way up from clerical jobs around the pit, or just knew somebody. A few were basically cerebral, academic.

Concerning the original question, what attributes would you look for if you were going to hire a trader, it would depend on how that person was going to trade. General qualities I'd want from any trader are competitiveness, extreme self confidence, lack of emotion while on the job, intuitiveness, and the obvious (willingness to work hard, yada yada yada). If the trader was going to be in the execution business, someone scalping or spreading (yield curve, crack spread, soybean crush, calendar, etc) on the screen, I'd want young people with fast reflexes and good peripheral vision, such as gamers. If I were hiring a position trader, I'd want someone who did not get too tied up in minutia, someone who could see the forest for the trees. For a high frequency algorithmic shop, I'd want the position trader above but with a math and computer science background.

I wouldn't hire people who are in it for the action, bad gamblers. They get wild and blow out. I wouldn't hire fragile egos; they overcompensate, and have extreme difficulty taking losses.