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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Finding Solutions To Your Trading Challenges

 

8/22/2025 - A major shortcoming of almost all coaching of professional traders is that it is conducted individually, not within the teams that they are part of.  The solution-focused framework described below is just as applicable to teams as to individuals--and often more so.  

Consider the possibility that the changes you want/need to make as a trader have already been made by someone on your team.  Suppose each team member already has a strength that you need to develop and that you have strengths that would benefit each team member.  

Now the goal of coaching is to be solution-focused within teams:  Find the exceptions to your problem patterns within the trading of one or more team members and make a concerted effort to model them.  Similarly, when you display a strength needed by a team member, you help that trader do more of what you're already doing well.

A good team is a combination of strengths and a community of traders that strengthen each other.  The trader you want to become is already present in some measure within your team.  This is a very important reason to not attempt to learn to trade in isolation.  All performance activities, in sports and in the arts, are learned through modeling and teamwork.  

8/21/2025 - The solution-focused paradigm is perhaps the most powerful framework for improving our trading because it naturally builds upon what we already do well.

The framework is this:

Find exceptions to your problem patterns:  occasions in which your problems do not occur or occur at a much smaller scale.  

When your problems aren't occurring, that is when you're doing something right.

Study what you're doing when you aren't having your problem, consider that as a possible best practice, and look to expand upon it.

For instance, one of my problems might be to take profits too early in a market move.  When I don't take profits early, it's because I have grounded myself in a longer timeframe perspective and have consciously identified a bigger picture target.  My confidence in the bigger picture idea, often anchored by research, outweighs the fear of losing my profit.

The exception to my problem pattern reveals a strength.

We develop as traders, not by focusing on our problems and negative emotions/patterns, but by identifying what we do when we make money and consciously "do more of what works".

Further Reading:

Becoming Solution-Focused in Our Trading

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How to Transform Ourselves: As People, As Traders

 

8/20/2025 - One of the most powerful paths to transformation is relationships.  A great deal of our development early in life is the internalization of relationships from parents, teachers, and other significant people in our lives.  We know from research in psychology that the quality of the relationship between therapists and clients is the single best predictor of success in making and sustaining changes in therapy.  The attachment to a mentor or colleague similarly helps us internalize their role modeling.  

A major challenge for individual traders early in their development is the absence of role modeling relationships.  Receiving teaching or coaching online can be helpful and informative, but it does not accomplish the transformation of a close relationship.  We develop expertise first by copying the work of successful mentors and then by synthesizing the learning and turning it into our own.  At the medical school where I teach, there are always multiple mentors in clinical training.  No one learns medicine on their own, and no one learns it from videos and websites.  We learn by doing, and we develop by learning from many role models in many settings.  Each role model is a path for development; multiple role models enable us to develop multidimensionally and uniquely.  This is why learning in teams is so powerful.     

8/18/2025 - Sound trading is training in intentionality, the capacity to establish and sustain purpose.  Quite literally, when we establish and follow trading processes, we train the brain to sustain purposeful action.  The enemy of good trading is not emotion or lack of discipline.  Those are the result of our failure to sustain the efforts needed to follow our best practices.  Our enemy is distraction and the inability to guide our thoughts and actions purposefully.  The small, repeated experiences referenced below are the ways in which we make efforts and turn those into routines.  That frees our minds for yet other, further efforts.  Process progress is measured in terms of taking purposeful behavior and turning that into reliable routine.  What takes effort day after day becomes relatively routine week after week and a natural part of us month after month.  We transform ourselves by turning our best actions into repeatable procedures and turning those procedures into reliable habit patterns.

If we're not building new routines and pushing new boundaries, we're stagnating.  The emotions that impact trading and that we hear so much about are simply the result of our challenges overwhelming our ability to sustain our best practices.         

8/17/2025 - In just a few months, the kitten we adopted has come a healthy young girl.  She began her time with us frightened and has grown into an active, playful, loving friend.  The transformation did not occur all at once.  Quite the contrary.  It was daily experience of feeding, holding, playing, and sleeping together that built a strong bond not only with us, but with our other cats.  The psychological principle here is that the most powerful changes occur through small, repeated experiences.  Doing new and different things--day after day--makes us new and different over a surprisingly short period--but only if those experiences are consistent and repeated many times per day.  Transformation is not accomplished by one big act of will.  It is achieved through sustained, consistent effort.  Day after day of loving Nomi turned a frightened kitten into a loving family member.  And changing our trading?  That occurs one trade at a time, doing the right things the right way--again and again and again.  

Doing new things renews us.

Further Reading:  The Naomi Principle - Overcoming Trauma

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How You Know You're Trading Well

 

8/15/2025 - Eight questions to assess whether you are trading well:

1)  Does your trading give you energy, challenge, and excite you or does it leave you drained and frustrated?

2)  What is one significant way in which you have grown in your trading over the course of this year?

3)  What is the one way you could most improve your trading and how are you working on that each trading session?

4)  How many people can you identify whose trading you are making better on a regular basis?

5)  How many people can you identify who are making your trading better on a regular basis?

6)  What have you learned this month from your greatest trading mistake?

7)  What have you learned this month from your greatest trading success?

8)  So far this year, what is your Sharpe ratio?  How does the average size of your winning trades compare with the average size of your losing trades?  What is your hit ratio (number of winning trades compared with number of losing trades)?  What are you doing--specifically--to improve your performance stats?  Can you truly expect to improve if you don't take the time/effort to keep score?

8/14/2025 - You know you're trading well when you can trace a clear evolution in what you do and how you do it.  Any great business evolves; it's not the same from one year to the next, one decade to the next.  They develop new products and services to replace older ones; they expand distribution; they make manufacturing more efficient; they offer new and different services to customers.  Great businesses keep score and know where they're performing well and where they are lagging.  

You're trading well when you develop new processes for generating ideas; an expanded range of ways for managing positions and risk; new markets and instruments to master.  The great trader spends as much time and energy on self-mastery as on market mastery, because success hinges on both.

8/14/2025 - You know you're trading well when you do a great job of being wrong.  The key question is, "How good are you at losing money?"  For talented directional traders, I've consistently found that win rates are not all that far from 50%.  Where those traders excel is in structuring trades to limit losses and allow for the possibility of large wins.  They don't just go long or short; they wait for flows to show them that the moves are happening *now* and then structure a trade with great reward relative to risk.  Then, if they're stopped out, they have plenty of dry powder and can step back and reassess their views.  Very often, a sound trade idea that doesn't work is telling you something about your market and can lead to an opportunity in the other direction.  Trading well means trading with an open mind and allowing losses to provide you with important information.  Trading well is trading flexibly, not with a fixed view and mindset.

Note that every trade is not only a view of direction, but also a view of volatility.  Where we take profits and let profits run captures our underlying view of how much the market is likely to move on our time frame.  Many times, traders focus on direction, not so much on vol.  You know you're trading well when you not only anticipation the direction of movement, but the extent of movement.  Trading well is trading with awareness, taking lessons away from winning trades and losing ones. 

8/13/2025 - How often are you in the "flow state" when you're trading?  In the flow state, we see markets differently and see things that we miss when we're not optimally focused.  If you're trying to find things to trade and attempting to not miss out, you're surely not in a flow state.  In flow, we are so focused on what we're seeing that opportunities come to us.  The patterns that we've reviewed and traded stand out when our minds are clear.  It is for this reason that it's a mistake to try to substitute positive thinking for negative thinking.  The best trading mindset is one in which we turn off our self talk so that ideas can come to us.  A great frontier for trading psychology is training our brains to stay in flow.  If we are scattered in our daily lives, can we expect to be focused in our trading?      

8/12/2025 - The quote from Rolf at Tradeciety captures an important dynamic.  The need to make money keeps us focused on short-term performance.  A desire for mastery keeps us focused on longer-term growth.  We know we're trading well when we are actively studying our performance as well as markets, taking away some learning--some important lessons--each day.  Here's a great psychological test:  If trading exhausts you, you know that you're a victim of the ups and downs of P/L and the need to make money.  If trading inspires you, you know that you're tapped into your growth as a trader.  Traders in professional settings are typically organized in teams, and they typically reach beyond their teams to connect with others, share views, and engage in mutual learning and development.  Great trading gives us energy.  Great trading processes immerse us in what we do well and what is meaningful to us.  We know we're trading well when trading is a platform for developing the best of who we are.

Best Practices for Building Your Trading Business

 

8/11/2025 - If you're building an enduring trading business, your review processes need to be as detailed as your trading processes.  Professionals in performance fields spend more time practicing, reviewing performance, and working on improvement as they do in formal performance.  The best reviews focus on opportunities you may have missed; what happened to your trades after you exited and how you could have managed the positions better; where you could have tactically added to positions and where you could have taken profits; etc.  In review, you're looking for the patterns in your trading just as rigorously as you look for market patterns.  Successful traders are motivated by the drive for improvement and mastery, not just the drive to make money.  Look at the trading journals you keep.  If you saw someone working on their trading the way you work on your trading, would you invest in them?

8/10/2025 - Your trading business should be grounded in some unique strength/experience that you possess and that others do not.  If you're not expert in some area, can you expect performance that reflects expertise?  What do you know and what do you do with that knowledge that makes you distinctive?  How are you special?

I'll just mention that my own trading is grounded in years and years of detailed study of patterns of stock market breadth:  overall market breadth and the breadth of various sectors.  These breadth patterns have an excellent historical track record of anticipating momentum/trend (continuation of recent movement) and reversal.  For example, when we see overall stock market strength in the major indexes but many sectors well off their highs and displaying poor breadth, the odds of reversal increase significantly.  

Note that we're near all-time highs in the broad equity indexes but well off our highs in small cap stocks, in the real estate sector, in the healthcare sector, in the regional banking sector, and lagging recent highs in the materials and energy sectors.  As of Friday, 449 stocks in the NYSE universe registered new monthly highs and 700 made fresh monthly lows.  We need to see breadth expand from here to keep the bull going.    

8/10/2025 - A unique challenge in building a trading business is that it takes optimism to sustain efforts across the ups and downs of P/L, but it takes realism to manage risk and limit losses.  A great principle is that, each day, you should know what--specifically--will tell you that your trade is wrong and you should get out.  That level should also be one that still allows you to recover your losses on your next trades.  In practice that means that the trade is different from the idea you are trading.  The trade is a risk-to-reward proposition that expresses an idea.  The idea may ultimately prove correct, but the trade is an attempt to capitalize on the idea here and now.  Even when we may hang onto an idea, it's important to be able to let go of the trade if the idea isn't playing out; i.e., if the marketplace is not recognizing that idea.  Conversely, it's important to recognize when the idea is truly playing out and to be able to treat it as more than a short-term trade.  Successful trading is a marriage of tactical and strategic thinking; being in the right mind frame is necessary for success but hardly sufficient.       

8/8/2025 - One of the most important lessons I learned early in my hedge fund career is that the best trading is planned, not reactive.  Indeed, every part of the trade--from the research of the idea to the timing/structure of the trade to the management of the risk--follows a plan.  That plan creates a replicable process that ensures we do the right things the right way with the right consistency.  This is yet another way in which your trading truly is a business.  The successful business does not operate by impulse and whim.  It follows best practices that have been shown to be profitable.  We cannot be our best selves and run our best businesses if we are reactive.

We can never be more planned in our trading than we are in our day-to-day lives.  If we are not living each day, each week intentionally, we unwittingly reinforce reactivity.  How we manage our risk ultimately mirrors how we manage our lives.  What will make today successful?  What will make this week successful?  What can I do right now to move forward with the plan for my day and week?  Living with purpose cultivates our ability to trade purpose-fully.

8/7/2025 - If you are approaching your trading business as a true entrepreneur, then you should be able to deliver an elevator pitch to someone who might want to invest their funds with you.  The elevator pitch would quickly summarize what makes you and your trading unique and why you are able to achieve superior returns relative to other traders in your space.  In the spirit of the below post, consider what your elevator pitch would be and whether you would invest with someone who delivered that pitch to you.  If you're truly running your trading as a business, you should be able to describe what you do, how you do it, and why it is uniquely successful in a short pitch.  If you don't have your edge thought through to that degree, should you really be investing in a strategy that you would reject if someone else brought it to you?  

8/7/2025 - Every serious trader is an entrepreneur.  We take the first step toward development when we make our trading business our business.  That means having a business plan, detailing our goals and the resources we need to reach those goals.  A great exercise that I've described in the past is to write out the business plan for your trading business.  Then put it away and read it carefully the next day, asking yourself, "If someone came to me with this plan, would I invest my money in their business?"  If the answer isn't "Hell, yeah!", perhaps we should rethink what we're doing with our time and energy.

A solid business plan for a trader describes in detail the opportunities pursued in markets and how those will be pursued; how capital will be allocated to trades; how risk will be managed; how performance will be reviewed and improved; and how new areas of business opportunity will be researched and developed.  Without sound business planning, can you truly expect to trade in a planned and sound fashion?       

Our Religious Beliefs, Our Spirituality, Our Trading: An Invitation

 

8/5/2025 - Life is a series of transitions, as we learn from the past and present and build a new future.  Each of our life's activities, from marriage and career to raising children, is also a series of transitions.  We build our lives by rebuilding our lives.  Just as we're created at birth, we re-create and renew ourselves.  Personal growth is not a smooth process.  It is a series of transitions and rebirths.  What is painful now is a birth pain for the person who will emerge.  How are your trading challenges meant to shape the person you're meant to become? 

8/4/2025 - Two pillars of success are the psychological dimensions of happiness and fulfillment.  Happiness is what brings us joy and fun; it makes us feel good, and it brings us emotional energy.  Fulfillment is different.  It is what is meaningful to us:  what brings us a sense of purpose and significance.  Many traders look to trading for happiness, but fail to pursue trading in a way that is fulfilling.  One topic we'll discuss in the upcoming online session (see below) is how we can bring greater meaning and purpose to our trading.  That is what is meant in Radical Renewal about trading from the soul and not only from the ego.  There will always be periods of profit and periods of loss in trading.  If there is nothing beyond P/L to make trading significant in our lives, we won't sustain the ups and downs.      

8/3/2025 - The reason we fail at trading is not because negative emotion takes over.  The reason we fail is that we adopt a trading process/approach that does not tap into what we do best and what we find most meaningful.  We copy some approach that we learn from another source with no assurance that the approach leverages our strengths and what gives us energy, meaning, and fulfillment.  (My book coming out early in 2026 tackles this topic in detail).  Suppose my greatest strength and source of inspiration is intellectual curiosity.  How is trading some mechanical indicator or chart pattern going to be fulfilling for me?  We fail at our discipline because we inevitably gravitate to who we are and what we do best.  Working on our negative emotions only doubles down on the problem.  The whole challenge of trading is to find approaches to markets that leverage our uniqueness and draw on our sources of energy.  Ironically, it is not our weaknesses that undermine us; it's our strengths.

8/3/2025 - Trading, properly pursued, makes us better as people.  When we truly train ourselves to trade well, we train ourselves to focus and listen to markets; to collaborate and learn with others, making everyone better; to reach a level of discipline and self-control where we can act with purpose and planning; to embrace our mistakes and learn from them; and to blend our analytical and intuitive capacities and act on opportunity.  Trading trains us to put our egos aside and make the right decisions at the right times for the right reasons.  Like all great pursuits, it pushes us from real to ideal:  to become more of the person we know we can be.  See below if you're interested in a free online session on the topic.  I don't solicit business at these sessions, but look forward to sharing and learning.

8/1/2025 - In my (free) blog-based online book Radical Renewal, I made a first attempt to explore the spirituality of trading, as opposed to the psychology of trading.  The key question I wanted to address is whether our spiritual development can benefit our development as traders.  As I explored the topic, it seemed to me that many trading problems are ultimately ones in which our egos get in the way of our performance.  The role of spirituality is to transcend ego, not simply eradicate negative emotion.  From that vantage point, the religious and spiritual beliefs that make us better people also can make us better at what we do:  in life and in markets.

I know, I know, I know, most of us are uncomfortable talking about our religious beliefs and practices and sensitive about not wanting to impose them on others.  It is rare indeed to encounter such talk in the field of trading psychology.  So we ignore a major dimension of human experience--which (ironically) may be the very problem that holds us back in our personal and trading success!

My own religious background is Jewish, and I regularly post to a website/blog, Integrative Judaism, that captures spiritual themes and lessons.  I'm continually surprised by how often these are themes that show up in my trading.  For example, repentance is a practice that shows up in many religious and spiritual traditions and that is particularly relevant at this time of year for those in the Jewish faith.  It is also something that helps us grapple with the ways in which we allow our egos to subvert our personal and professional lives--including our trading.

I would love to host an online session for traders of different spiritual/religious beliefs and share how these impact our trading--and our daily lives.  If this is of interest to you and you would like to be part of the sharing/learning, please feel free to email me at steenbab at aol dot com.  It would be fun--and hopefully enlightening--to connect a small community of spiritually-grounded market participants!

Thanks as always for your interest and support--

Brett