About
Greetings. I’m Kris Matthews and I’m a researcher in energy materials and economics in New York. I often travel, and have gained a fascination with foreign cultures, histories, and of course, currencies and international capital markets. At the moment I trade foreign exchange and other macro instruments as well as their derivatives for my own account and a manage investments service that I run. I’ve been featured in interviews and have written articles on a few websites. This blog consists of my epiphanies on the markets and trading. Particularly I aim to highlight shifts in thinking and how to frame the market’s perceptions in a way to get positively-skewed expectations over time. Beyond our efforts, being successful at anything requires understanding two things: chance and human beings. Success hinges upon luck and how people can help us, teach us, provide resources for us, and also understanding of what people want and how they think. We deal with chance as traders by embracing randomness and utilizing the concept of an edge. We deal with human beings by understanding their perceptions, emotions, and general psychology.
What is the Gestalt shift? It is a transition to an entirely different way of perceiving something. The human mind likes regular, ordered patterns and sees things holistically instead of looking at things individually. In terms of this column, the Gestalt shift represents two things: First, as traders it is the shift away from heuristic thinking that dominates the trading activity of the majority and seeing things for what they really are. Secondly, as analysts it is recognizing the event or information that causes the market to wake up to a fundamentally new concept and begin pricing it in. As I write articles every week, I welcome any questions and epiphanies of your own.
