The Smartest Guys in the Trade
Traders don’t need the highest IQ in the room—they can succeed with discipline, quick calculations, confident decisions and a little online help
People are sensitive about IQ. It’s a metric that purportedly reveals intelligence, and everyone wants to be thought of as smart—or at least smarter than average. And in the 100 years or so since IQ tests arose, proponents and opponents have argued vigorously for and against them.
One of the most contentious discussions of IQ centered on the 1994 book The Bell Curve by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. The authors analyzed and plotted IQs and saw that they fell nicely along the shape of a bell curve, more properly known as a normal distribution. Most IQs were clustered around...
