Are you a RISK taker? Discipline, Risk aversion, and 'The Black Swan' (Taleb)

Do you consider yourself a taker of great risks? Not physical risks that could harm the body and or mind, but financial risks that come with the occupation of trading. Interestingly, most traders do not see themselves as risk takers, risk averse, or operating in ways that expose their capital and financial well being to events or situations that could cause serious damage. I find this to be very intriguing, and can admit that for the longest time I never saw myself as a risk taker. I was a disciplined, mechanical, thoughtful, and overly cautious trader who never did things out of order and never was the person to succumb to his or her emotional impulses, so of course there was NO WAY that I could be leaving myself exposed to serious financial risks, right? WRONG....

Although the aforementioned qualities I found within my trading were then, and still are today very important factors when it comes to my ability to be profitable over the long run, what I misunderstood for so long (learned the hard way, will expand further) was that risk simply comes with the profession of trading. There is no way to avoid the act of taking risks while being a trader. It is as simple as that. People may tell you that a computer model or some automated trading system has been tested and retested to show that there are zero risks, but you need only to hear such a thing to immediately know how incredibly false such a claim is. How could trading involve no risk? Even those with the utmost in discipline, the best knowledge, most professional strategies, and entire teams of researchers and trading psychologists to help gain edge (a trader's probability breakdown) have had experiences in the market that blew them up or caused such intense emotional trauma that their trading was never the same again. Probability and chance can be blamed for this, and nothing else. As the author Nassim Taleb writes in "The Black Swan" and "Fooled By Randomness", chance is the only true constant in the markets. The fact that anything can and will happen at any moment in time, should make a trader sit up straight in their chair, but instead ideas such as this are many times brushed off as "too rare for consideration". How could one be so incredibly naive, especially when money is on the line, to assume that their impression of wordly financial markets is somehow a safer bet than the undeniable fact that anything can happen to anyone at anytime? I really am not qualified to answer this question, but after reading Nassim Taleb, I believe he is definitely a great place to start. His books have offended many a great Wall St hedge funders, money managers, and big-time executives because most of these people have derived a great deal of pride and ego from the belief that their superior intelligence is the root cause of their financial success. In certain ways this is true, and should never be underestimated, but in other ways this can be fatalistic in that one can set themselves up for inevitable failure at any moment that the world decides to produce a chance outcome/probability expression that was not accounted for. After all, how can one account for the unaccountable? Simply put, you cannot; but just as simply, you can ensure that your trading takes place from the mental perspective that 'anything can happen at anytime to anyone'. Inherently, in my experiences and in my opinion, one's trading will quite mysteriously improve from this point forward. Do you need to still do the work required from a common sense perspective? Of course. Mechanical strategy, discipline, and emotional/psychological recognition and control are paramount in the search for consistent results.