BRETT STEENBARGER'S TRADING PSYCHOLOGY RESOURCE CENTER

Below are resources to help traders become their own trading coaches, improve their trading processes, and develop a positive work-life balance.  All the TraderFeed posts also contain links to valuable resources and perspectives.  

RADICAL RENEWAL - Free blog book on trading, psychology, spirituality, and leading a fulfilling life

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The Three Minute Trading Coach Videos

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Forbes Articles:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettsteenbarger/
  

My coaching work applies evidence-based psychological techniques (see my background and my book on the topic) to the improvement of productivity, quality of life, teamwork, leadership, hiring best practices, and creativity/idea generation.  An important part of the "solution-focused" approach that I write about is that we can often best grow by focusing on what we do well and how we do it--and then doing more of what works for us.  The key is to know our cognitive, interpersonal, and personality strengths and leverage those in the pursuit of performance. 

FURTHER RESOURCES

*  A Creative Way to Use TraderFeed 

*  Brett Steenbarger Bio

*  Brett's Books on Trading Psychology

I wish you the best of luck in your development as a trader and in your personal evolution.  In the end, those are one and the same:  paths to becoming who we already are when we are at our best.

Brett
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A Different Kind of Trading Psychology Workshop

 

Many thanks for the interest in the trading psychology workshop.  Registration is closed at this time due to the large number of interested participants.  

6/17/25 - The most important issue for us to tackle is not how to trade or how to improve our trading.  The most important issue is to identify--clearly--what you are meant to be doing with your life.  What are your gifts and how can you leverage them to make for a better life and a better world?  And how does trading fit into that life vision?  More important than trading markets is investing in your life's purpose.  More on that topic during tomorrow's free trading psychology workshop.  See below for registration info - Brett

6/16/25 - What are your unique, distinctive strengths and how can you best apply them to achieve trading success?  In the free trading psychology workshop on Wednesday afternoon after the NYSE close, we'll tackle precisely that topic.  When you're aligned with who you truly are at your best, the right performance psychology naturally follows.  Instructions for signing up for the session are below; links will go out Wednesday AM.  Thanks!

6/15/25 - Below is the information for registering for the free Wednesday online workshop after the market close.  Here are three best practices I'll be sharing in the workshop: 

1)  Original research on stock market breadth and specific trading signals for trading the broad market.  This will include instructions for creating your own database and a unique exit strategy to help maximize winning trades;

2)  Three new forms of brain wave technology that can greatly assist us in maintaining an optimal trading psychology.  I believe these to be the most important game changers in trading psychology to come along in many years.

3)  How professional traders approach dangerous market conditions, as we're seeing currently because of the war situation in the Middle East.

I hope to see you after the close on Wednesday and look forward to each of us sharing best practices.       

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This coming Wednesday (June 18th) after the NYSE close (4:15 PM ET), I'll hold a trading psychology workshop online for traders looking for new ways to improve their trading.  The session will address the needs of traders who have achieved a measure of success and now who are looking to take their trading to that proverbial next level.  To sign up, send an email to steenbab at aol dot com and I'll email you a link to the session.

I'm looking forward to a different kind of trading psychology workshop.  Attendance at Wednesday's session is free of charge, but I ask that each attendee bring to the event one best practice that has helped their trading.  The best practice could be a unique approach to trading, an innovation to improve trading process and performance, or a fresh method for sourcing trade ideas.  I've mentioned in the past that a slogan at the medical school where I teach is "Each one teach one".  In Wednesday's workshop, I invite all attendees to be teachers and all to be learners, myself included!

In the session, there will be two ways to share your best practice:  1) You can bring them to the meeting and share them over the Zoom chat function or 2) You can send them to me in advance when you send your email to steenbab at aol dot com to get the link for the session.  

For those who send me best practices in advance, I'll send out an email blast  (email addresses will be private) and include all the best practices as they've been written up.  (Please let me know in your email whether you'd like your best practice to be anonymous or whether you'd like to be acknowledged by name).  This will provide a resource of best practices that can guide performance long after the session has ended.  

Whether it's by sharing during the session or by writing up and sharing ideas, let's all be teachers and learners and see if we can create a different kind of workshop--

Brett

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Understanding Your Best Trading

 

6/12/2025 - In the research I've conducted re: the personality and life history predictors of trading success, several factors consistently stand out.  One of those is the capacity for pattern recognition.  Successful traders are more curious than others and look at more things in a greater variety of ways.  This enables them to see patterns that, over time, they discover to be meaningful.

Many traders equate pattern recognition with the patterns they track on charts.  This is certainly one form of recognition, but not the type I most commonly see among hedge fund portfolio managers.  They collect a great deal of data on inflation, monetary policies around the world, behaviors of various markets, sentiment, economic growth, etc. and piece the information together to form coherent views of stocks, bonds, currencies, etc.

The identification of market cycles across different periods, as described below, is yet another form of pattern recognition.  I view this as a look from the "bottom up", since it assembles price and volume data across shorter to longer intervals.  In my own trading, I combine this with a "top down" view which looks for historical, statistical patterns in the market.  For example, in the chart above, we can see a cycle bottoming out across the various indicators described below.  At the same time, we had displayed very few stocks making fresh one- and three-month lows in the lead up to this period.  When we look historically, the absence of weakness is quite bullish, especially over a 10-20 trading day horizon.  Markets usually don't plunge until one or more sectors display deterioration.

The combination of the statistical pattern and the real time cyclical pattern produces a trading view with considerable supportive evidence.  That pattern recognition underlies our psychological confidence in our ideas--and our ability to size up positions.  I did not develop confidence in my trading by working on my psychology; I improved my psychology through better and better pattern recognition.

6/11/2025 - Above is a screenshot from yesterday's market in the micro-ES futures contract.  The previous posts in this series will explain much of what I'm tracking in real time.  The bars on the top portion of the chart represent the SPX futures, where the candles capture the high/low/close for each 15,000 contracts traded.  As a result, we're drawing relatively few bars in the overnight sessions and many more during the busier morning hours.  This helps identify market cycles.

The green and red lines going through the candlestick bars are the short-term (red) and longer-term (green) moving averages defined by the MESA Adaptive Moving Average system.  When the red line crosses above the green, it's confirming an uptrending move and vice versa.  Note that I track the identical cycle movements for shorter-term charts (2000 contracts per bar) and longer-term charts (50,000 contracts per bar).  I use the shorter-term crossovers to help trade the longer-term shifts in trend/cycle.

The vertical blue and red lines at the bottom of the chart represent the Woodies CCI trend measures, where blue is uptrending and red is downtrending.  The green and red dots above these lines represent significant buying and selling.  Together, with the adaptive moving average crossovers and across the shorter- and longer-term charts, these help visualize occasions when trends are dying out and reversing and when trending behavior is present.  It is the lining up of these patterns across shorter- and longer periods that identifies opportunities to ride the cycles and exit them.

This way of looking at markets may or may not be helpful for you.  It is my way of distilling a great deal of directional and cyclical behavior across multiple time frames.  What many traders see as "choppy" markets are often markets dominated by shorter-term cycles that are tradeable.  Similarly, what looks like trending markets are often markets dominated by longer-term cycles.  What is important from the perspective of trading psychology is that you find *your* way of representing and visualizing market behavior that aids your decision-making.  Many, many times traders become frustrated with markets and make poor decisions because they are locked into one time period and one type of market behavior and fail to perceive the contexts of market movements.

6/10/2025 - The foundation for cycle identification with the charts denominated in volume rather than time (see below) is the MESA Adaptive Moving Average (MAMA) system developed by John Ehlers.  This creates shorter and longer-term moving averages based upon the cyclicality of the market and then identifies crossovers between the shorter and longer-term averages.  I construct the MAMA on multiple volume-based charts, from very short-term to medium and longer-term.  When there are upside and downside crossovers at multiple intervals, that's when the cycles are lining up and it becomes possible to take a solid reward-to-risk trade.  All of this is easily constructed in the Sierra Chart platform.  I rely on the NYSE TICK measure during NYSE hours to get a more finely grained indication of buying/selling pressure to identify when short-term cycles are turning.  I outline all of this--and will present an illustration--to emphasize an important point in trading psychology:  We are most likely to work on our trading and refine our trading if we develop our own ideas based upon what makes sense to us.  Too often, traders attempt to copy others and then lack conviction to stick with their ideas.  The goal of this post is certainly not for traders to copy what I do, but to encourage traders to figure out what they need to do.         

6/9/2025 - A particular challenge for active, intraday traders is that market activity (volume/volatility) changes significantly as a function of time of day.  On average, there is much more volume and movement in US stock index futures, for example, during the New York Stock Exchange hours than overnight; there is much more volume and movement early and late in the day than at midday.  When we measure cycles in time units, we end up comparing apples and oranges.  If the underlying time series is not relatively stationary/uniform, we cannot identify cycles that are relatively uniform in frequency or magnitude.  When the X-axis of our charts represents volume, not time, each bar is a standard amount of volume traded and we draw more bars during busy periods and fewer during slow periods.  Cycles appear quicker or slower but are more uniform in composition.  When we create charts where the bars represent different volume sizes, we now can see when and how shorter-term cycles line up with longer-term ones.  The shorter-term cycles can guide execution to trade the longer-term cyclical movements.  It becomes easier to trade trends when we see these as the directional portions of longer-term cycles.  Illustrations soon to follow...       

6/8/2025 - What I've come to understand is that no amount of focusing on bad trading and trading mistakes is sufficient to create good trading.  Good trading comes from zeroing in on what you do well and what makes sense to you and then refining and refining your ways of capitalizing on those strengths.  My worst trading comes from focusing on (and chasing) trends.  My best trading comes from identifying cycles in markets and identifying when short, medium, and longer-term cycles are lining up.  Ironically, many of those trades might look like catching trends early, but those trends are simply the early phases of longer-term cycles.  It's the lining up of multiple cycles that creates the favorable reward-to-risk edge.  

Understanding those cycles not only allows for sound entries, but guides the process of holding trades.  If you're oversold across multiple periods and go long, there's little incentive to take profits when the shortest cycle turns to overbought.  Indeed, waiting for the shortest cycle to turn down while the others are still rising and far from their peaks can create opportunities to add to positions.  

The challenge of this approach to trading, which I'll be illustrating in the near future, is that until cycles align, the best trading is no trading.  The goal is to find a few meaningful "setups" and exploit them fully.  One of the most difficult forms of trading discipline can be the discipline to not trade.  That means that the disciplined trader needs the discipline of doing things other than trading during the majority of periods when cycles are not fully aligning.  When you know what to look for, your best trades come to you--and there is no need to chase random moves.