Fortune Magazine on Decision Making

There’s a section on how to make great decisions in the June 27th Fortune magazine. One of the people they interviewed is a derivatives trader. Here’s a portion of what he had to say:

I supervise about 23 people, and we can trade $1 billion a day. My goal is to make money 52% of the time. I can make the right call half the time by flipping a coin; a good trader does a little better. Successful traders don’t spend much time regretting decisions or going back over things. If a decision turned out to be wrong, so what? Move on. So when you have to make a quick decision and you know that there’s a good chance it will be wrong—the worst thing you can possibly do is sit there and panic and hope. You have to be decisive—go on and do it. When I see somebody go into panic mode, I tell them, “Get off the desk. Go for a workout, or go sit in the park for an hour.”