The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking Transforms Us, Body and Mind

by John Coates

My colleagues and I found further evidence that this molecule influences a trader’s profitability, and we did so more or less by chance. When I was on the trading floor conducting the first study, I brought a stack of science papers with me to read during downtime. One of these recounted an experiment in which the author, John Manning, had taken handprints from a group of football players, and found that their ability and success could be predicted from the lengths of their index and ring fingers, and specifically from the ratio of the two. This ratio, known as 2D:4D, meaning second digit length divided by fourth, could predict sporting ability because, Manning claimed, it gauged the amount of testosterone the athletes had been exposed to in the womb, a longer ring finger relative to index indicating higher androgen exposure. The idea at first seemed crazy to me, but also fun, so I began collecting handprints from traders. Later, when the back office of the trading firm sent me the P&Ls of these traders, I found to my amazement that their 2D:4D ratios predicted their profitability over the previous two years. What was even more astonishing was that their 2D:4D ratios predicted how long these traders had survived in the business. The results suggested that a hormone these individuals had been exposed to before they were even born was predicting their lifetime performance in high-frequency trading.

This is fuckin nuts