A cool trader is a good trader
The key to being cool-headed is to be cool-bodied.
You can have a good sleep, a good meal and every trading tool in the world but getting the trading floor temperature just right is a constant battle.
I like it cold but Bloomberg today writes that many offices are actually too cold.
"In a 2010 study published in the journal HVAC&R Research, Hedge and his collaborators measured productivity by monitoring employees' computer activity, as well as how many errant keystrokes workers made. They found that those in offices with temperatures in the low 70s produced noticeably less output-and possibly made more mistakes-than their warmer counterparts. The differences were stark. Although the number of keystrokes somebody types is an imperfect measure of productivity, workers in an office that was 78F produced more than twice as many as those in a 70-degree environment. In fact, productivity rose along with temperature in a linear fashion before plateauing in the high 70s and dropping once again in the mid-80s."
My guess is that trading floors and offices tend to run too hot. I'm running 8 monitors, 2 computers and a television and it creates a microclimate that I battle with a separate air conditioner (aside from the central air). But the noise drowns out the television so it's a battle to get it just right and a fan isn't quite enough.
Then again, the Canadian winter is right around the corner so I better be careful what I wish for.
