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Why Important?
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The biggest secret about success is that there isn't any big secret about it, or if there is, then it's a secret from me, too. The idea of searching for some secret for trading success misses the point.
Ed Seykota

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One of the common struggles in new and experienced traders is outlined in this excerpt:
We also prefer the complex and artificial to the simple and unadorned. We are certain that investment success requires an incredibly complex ability to judge a host of variables correctly and ...

The ability to make decisions when faced with an assortment of opportunities and choices is central to Trend Following success. The following links must be read by all:

1. Example Heuristics (PDF)

2. Smart Heuristics by Gerd Gigerenzer

We have long posted decision-making links for trading. The following excerpts from The New York Times continues that tradition:

When Justine Henin-Hardenne rips a cross-court forehand at the Australian Open or Tom Brady, the ...

Last year Moneyball introduced statistical thinking for baseball to the masses. Now Wayne Winston and Jeff Sagarin are applying "numbers" to basketball in a way people will not expect:

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For all those that question how important decision-making actually has become, Daniel Akst recently offered in the Wall Street Journal a reminder:

If you're newly graduated from college, you may be wondering right about now just how you're going to save the world. Your commencement ...

Rajesh Mahapatra writing for The Associated Press on Wednesday, August 25, 2004:

Kuwait's foreign minister said Wednesday that Middle East oil exporters are producing at maximum capacity to stabilize prices that are being driven up by speculators from outside the region. Oil ...

Full House
The Spread of ExcellenceFrom Plato to Darwin

The following excerpts are from Stephen Jay Gould's Full House.

People under assault, and hopelessly overmatched, often do the opposite of what ...

Clayton Christensen

The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen is a great read for Trend Followers. Christensen recently offered in an interview:

They were looking at the book [Innovator's Dilemma] for answers rather than for understanding. They were saying 'tell me what to do' as opposed to 'help me understand so I can decide what to do.'...[Wall Street analysts] are theory-free investors. All they can do is react to the numbers. But the numbers they react to are measures of past performance, not future performance. That's why they go in big herds. Wall Street professionals and business consultants have enshrined as a virtue the notion that you should be data-driven. That's at the root of the inability of companies to take action in a timely way.

Christensen clearly outlines a key tenet of the Trend Following mindset. Trend Following is never based on having all the data. It's based on odds and reaction. Think about it. If you look at a stock such as Yahoo and witness its great rise and decline you can say 'you should have bought here and sold there'. But isn't that 20/20 hindsight? No, you simply needed a trading plan of attack before the great rise up and great decline down.

What Christensen is driving at is the notion that you must be able to make decisions in the face of not knowing how the trend will look when it's all over. You must have a plan to act early before trend direction is obvious to the masses. You must be set and ready to go (and entered) long before the TV watchers decide the trend is underway and jump on. Those people are always a day late and a dollar short. Those people are the herds Christensen alludes to. Those people don't make the money, they lose it. And given that trading is a zero-sum game, the money that those people lose goes directly to the other people with the plans of attack designed to win their losses.