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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New Techniques For Improving Trading Psychology

 

2/26/2025 - Well, the new book is finally available!  The subtitle says it all:  Turning personal strengths into trading strengths.  The big challenge for developing traders is figuring out what they do well and then leveraging that in their trading processes.  Yes, it's important to avoid trading on tilt, fear, greed, etc.  Doing less of the negative, however, will not achieve positives.  The important perspective that the book discusses is that your trading success will draw upon the same strengths that have created your life's successes to this point.  Think of your greatest accomplishments, your greatest areas of mastery.  Somehow, in some way, your trading has to leverage the talents and skills behind your life's greatest achievements.  

In this series of posts, we'll look at innovations in positive psychology that can improve our trading psychology and our trading practice.  The solution focus is one of the most basic innovations, where we turn our attention to situations in which our problems are not occurring.  We don't always trade with poor discipline.  We don't always trade emotionally.  What are we doing when we are disciplined and level-headed?  Is there something we're doing that we're not aware of that actually is the solution to our problems?  Many, many times, our best practices are hiding in the situations where our problem patterns are not occurring.  Let's journal those exceptions!  Let's learn from what we're doing right!

In the book, I describe the learning process at SMB Capital, where newer traders operate in teams with more experienced traders.  In some teams, the experienced mentor and the developing trader will share a joint account and make decisions together:  what to trade, how to size it, how to manage the risk, etc.  Yes, this is a great practice for learning trading, but notice how it is also a great way to study successes and identify best practices.  If everyone you team up with shares just one thing each day that they did well and breaks it down to show how they did it, imagine the acceleration of learning and development that would occur!  Even if you use a trading community to find just one trading buddy, that could greatly expand the development of your trading strengths.

Studying the one or two or three great trades you placed in the last week helps you internalize the ingredients of your success, but more importantly helps you internalize a sense for your own greatness.

How Can New Research In Psychology Help Our Trading? - Physical Exercise

 

2/25/2026 - A major challenge for physical exercise is that it, like many things in life, can become routine.  Ideally, exercise pushes us hard enough that it becomes truly effortful, not at all comfortable and routine.  Also, when we vary exercise, we practice making efforts in multiple ways.  For instance, I alternate days of working on flexibility and strength (upper and lower body) and working on aerobic fitness and core strength.  This creates a structure for regularly challenging ourselves and pushing our limits.  

What we're really exercising is our capacity to sustain effort.  We only possess free will to the degree that we can form and sustain our intentions.  Everything we exercise strengthens our free will muscles, because we're exercising goal-oriented behavior.  As we build our intentionality, that carries over to other areas of our lives.  Recent research (cited below) finds that an ongoing program of exercise enables us to get more out of each session.  In other words, not only are we "fertilizing" the brain (see below), but we're adding more fertilizer over time.  

In my routine, I wake up at 4:15 AM; greet and feed four hungry cats; immediately go on a power walk and begin my quest for 10,000 steps daily; then work out at home or the local gym; and then engage in prayer and study before actually beginning the work day.  Exercising love.  Exercising the body.  Exercising the soul.  Every day.  

To keep going, we have to keep growing.    

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2/24/2026 - The finding that exercise leads to enhanced BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor; see below) has led to research documenting the ways in which combining exercise with important cognitive activities helps us process the information from those activities more deeply and effectively.  As one example, we can combine exercise with our market preparation for the day or with our trading reviews.  The heightened brain activity created by the exercise improves our processing and makes our preparation more likely to stick.

What if it's not fear, greed, and lack of discipline that interfere with our trading, but suboptimal brain functioning?  By not working out the body, we keep our minds in more sluggish and distractible states.  I'm currently working out with a fitness organization, and the coach there routinely prescribes new exercises for me to improve my core functioning, my strength, my flexibility, etc.  I find that mastering new exercises--and exercising new body areas and functions--creates overall well-being that carries over to other areas of life.  

The ultimate workout is a workout of our willpower.  By continually challenging our limits, we become comfortable with challenge and more able to respond to the market's challenges.  By increasing our BDNF, we fertilize our ability to process market information and identify emerging opportunity and threat.  The important conclusion of recent research is that exercising the body sharpens the mind and trains us to tolerate uncertainty and challenge.

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2/23/2026 - Recent research in psychology suggests that physical exercise not only helps our mood and the clarity of our thinking, but also significantly contributes to our resilience (Smits & Otto, 2024, p. 76-78).  Resilience refers to our ability to tolerate stress and discomfort and persist in our planned activities.  It is difficult to think of anything more relevant and valuable for traders.  Indeed, we can think of the lack of "discipline" often discussed in trading psychology texts as actually a limited degree of resilience.  We need to get better at tolerating discomfort and persisting with our efforts if we are going to succeed in difficult market conditions.

There are two ways in which we can use exercise to improve our resilience during trading.  First, we can turn each exercise into an opportunity to build resilience.  That means that we make conscious efforts to push past our comfort zones and lift enough weights, run with enough speed and incline, to expand our capacities.  Every workout thus becomes a workout of our willpower.  Indeed, a training coach can help us make sure that we perform exercises the right way and also persist long enough to build our endurance and strength.

Second, we can use each routine in our workouts as an opportunity to exercise mindfulness.  Note how many people working out at a gym will listen to music on their phones while they're on the treadmill or doing calisthenics.  They are distracting themselves from the difficult experience of physical effort.  Suppose, however, they were to sustain attention throughout their routine, thus exercising their capacity for awareness at the same time that they exercise their bodies.  Our routines become training in cognitive focus under conditions of stress--quite relevant to trading.

By training ourselves to strive for goals under conditions of challenge, we become more capable of maintaining our functioning in challenging market conditions.  If we don't challenge ourselves and develop our intentionality outside of markets, can we expect to trade with free will?

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2/22/2026 - The discovery that exercise impacts the mind in ways strikingly similar to antidepressant medications (see below) is a complete game changer.  Yes, we've long known that exercise is a component of well-being and that when we have more energy, we can perceive more and accomplish more.  That is important.  We cannot get very far in life with a sluggish body.

The finding that exercise enhances the neurotransmitters serotonin, norepinephrine, and GABA (Otto & Smits, 2024) raises the possibility that we can engage in specific exercises to achieve specific improvements in our cognitive and emotional functioning.  Research finds that "Exercise also has important effects on a crucial brain-maintenance molecule known as BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor).  BDNF has been called a memory molecule because it is involved in the way the brain forms memories, helping those memories to be available for guiding ongoing functioning" (p. 12).  The authors refer to BDNF as a kind of "Miracle-Gro" for the brain, fertilizing our brain's functions as we might fertilize a plant's growth.

When we exercise before an activity that involves important learning (a therapy session, a trading session, a review of trading), three benefits become evident:  "better mood, less anxiety reactivity, and enhanced memory" (p. 91).  In short, exercise helps us process information better and more deeply.  If our goal is to learn, it is best accomplished in an optimal physical state.

Work on our strength conditioning?  Work on our aerobic conditioning?  Work on our flexibility?  Our core?  What if each has a unique, distinctive impact when pursued regularly and properly?  It doesn't matter how many trades, research reports, and charts we process if we're not in our best state of mind and body.

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2/20/2026 - In this series of posts, we'll take a look at recent research in psychology and how that research might be relevant to our trading performance.  The idea is that all work on performance should be based upon objective evidence, not just practical "coaching" advice.  It turns out that recent research finds an amazing correlation between our physical fitness/conditioning and our psychology/performance.

A significant portion of the population is quite lacking in fitness.  According to research from the Centers for Disease Control, 25% of the population reports no deliberate physical exercise in the past month and fewer than 25% of adults meet recommended guidelines for strength and aerobic conditioning.  Interestingly, exercise boosts our levels of neurotransmitters, much as psychiatric medication does.  Indeed, Smits and Otto, in their review, suggest that "exercise may be conceptualized as a non-pharmacological analogue of antidepressant medication" (p. 8).

From a positive psychology perspective, exercise boosts our sense of wellness, which in turn energizes our work efforts.  The right kind of session in the gym not only exercises our strength and aerobic capacity, but also is a direct experience of goal setting and achievement.  Smits and Otto also point out that exercise benefits sleep quality, providing us with a clearer mindset and boosting our sense of resilience.

In the next post, we'll take a closer look at how we can use exercise as a psychological treatment.     

  

Best Practices For Coaching Our Own Trading

 

2/19/2026 - Note how in every performance activity--acting, music, sports, dancing--there are active practice sessions that accomplish two purposes:  they keep the performer in shape, and they rehearse the challenges that are likely to be faced during live performance.  Active coaching guides the structure of those practice sessions and provides real time feedback, so that the performer can make corrections and improve performance before everything goes live.  As the saying goes, it's not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect.  The coach's job is to create perfect practice.

If we understand the importance of the above, we can appreciate why so few developing traders succeed.  They don't engage in active practice, and they don't receive real-time coaching during their practice that enables them to make changes that will carry over to market hours.  Going over P/L and making some notes in a journal is great, but it is not active practice.  No sports team would improve on the field simply by writing in journals.  

Without practice trading, our live trading becomes practice--and few can survive the toll that learning curve takes on our accounts.  The "setups" we trade don't matter if we fail to practice recognizing and acting upon them.  Successful self-coaching means guiding ourselves in practice, so that we're programmed to do the right things in real time.

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2/18/2026 - One way to coach your own trading is during review processes.  At the end of the day, week, and month, you can track what you did well and what needs improvement.  Both provide opportunities for goal setting, as you have goals to repeat and expand what you did well and goals to correct what you didn't do well.  Those goals provide a motivational focus each day as you track how well you're reaching your goals and encouraging yourself to tackle the next set of goals.  Notice that there is a motivational component to this self-coaching that is often missing in traders' reviews.  As your own coach, you are like a coach in the gym assisting a workout.  Your role is to instruct and guide, but also to encourage, push, and motivate.  A coach doesn't allow a performer to stay in their comfort zone.

I was in the gym this morning and heard someone on the mats yelling out instructions:  "Do three more!" and "Let's pick it up!"  He sounded a little like a drill sergeant, but also like a motivational coach.  "You can do it!"  When I walked over to his area, I saw that he was talking to himself!  He was exercising, but he was coaching himself while performing the exercises.  His self-coaching was in real time.

We are always talking to ourselves, including during our trading.  By making our self-talk coaching talk, we can bring our motivation and change efforts to real time.  We don't need to wait for performance review to coach our performance.

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2/17/2026 - What is the ideal team structure?  If we're going to team up with other traders, who should be part of our team and how should we structure team interactions?

As the posts below suggest, how we coach ourselves helps shape our performance.  When we reach out for teamwork--even a collaboration with one other trader--we want to select someone who meets the following criteria:  1) They have some area of experience/skill that could benefit our trading; 2) They have areas for improvement in their own trading that could benefit from our experience/skills; 3) They show the performance and leadership mindsets necessary to coach themselves and benefit from the coaching of others.

Teamwork accelerates development.  It does so because it takes your self-coaching and raises it exponentially by turning coaching into a team process.

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2/16/2026 - Quick reflection:  What emotional tone do you use with yourself when you're reviewing your trading?  Is it pretty much emotionless:  a summary of what happened, etc?  Is it a negative tone, blaming yourself for mistakes?  If a sports coach used your tone in reviewing game performance with a team, how effective would that coach be?  How often do you motivate and inspire yourself?  How often do you get fired up by what you did well?  

Most of us coach ourselves in ways that we would never coach someone in a performance field.  How we talk to ourselves shapes how we perform.

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2/15/2026 - I'm going to ask a very important question, one that is rarely addressed by traders or coaches.  

Ready?

How do you get the discipline to follow your discipline?

You have a discipline:  a process for finding trading opportunities, a process for managing the risk of positions, etc.  You also have a personal discipline around things like diet, exercise, sleep, relationships, etc.

As we all know, however, willpower is typically not sufficient for sticking to our discipline.  We can overtrade, we can fail to manage the risk of a position, we can eat too much, etc.  We have a discipline, but not the discipline to follow our discipline!

The discipline to follow our discipline comes from inspiration.  If we are energized and inspired by what we do, no one can stand in the way of our doing the right things.  If I'm an Olympic athlete, I'm inspired by the competition and the possibility of representing my country and winning a medal.  That vision keeps me performing difficult training, day after day.

So now you see:  we lack the discipline to follow our discipline because we lack a visionary goal that inspires and energizes us.  Making money is not a visionary goal.  For many of us, it simply expresses a need.  The portfolio manager I work with who uses a portion of his profits to benefit at-risk youth--and who devotes meaningful time to mentoring those youth--now has an overarching *reason* to trade well and succeed.  He is not pushed by his needs; he is pulled by a greater ideal.

So often, we don't fail because of shortcomings, but because of the absence of greatness.  If we don't think and feel greatly about our lives, how in the world are we to trade greatly?

Again, if we don't think and feel greatly about our lives, how will be sustain great trading?

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2/13/2026 - In this set of posts, we'll take a look at how traders can successfully coach themselves and accelerate their development.  A point that I made in the recent trading psychology conference was that my goal is not to become a trader's coach for life, but to teach traders tools for coaching themselves for life.  Coaching ourselves means that we need to dedicate time each day to standing apart from our trading, reviewing markets, reviewing our trading, looking for patterns in both, and learning from those.

Note the key word here:  patterns.  There are patterns to markets, and there are patterns to our trading of markets.  One exercise that I engaged in when I first learned trading--and that I have resumed recently--is identifying the one or two best trading opportunities each day in the SPX and how those could have been identified with my toolkit:  NYSE/NQ/SPX TICK; cycles based upon volume bars; moving average crossovers and divergences from moving averages/VWAP based upon volume bars; areas of volume expansion; and confirmations/divergences among different market indexes.  In the past, I did not have such an extensive toolkit, so returning to the exercise now provides fresh learning.  The goal is not just to understand the market better, but to become better as a pattern recognizer.

So what is the best practice here?  It's performance review, but directed toward the market, not toward ourselves.  We want to become better and better at finding opportunity, and we can only do that by looking at opportunity after opportunity, day after day.  Over time, we internalize the patterns that we trade.

And, by the way, patterns trend.  Patterns that show up at one point in time tend to recur:  at later times, on larger and shorter time frames, etc.  And if you do want to hire a trading coach?  Find out, with specifics, how they coach their own trading.    

The Power of Diversification

 

2/12/2026 - Take a look at a six-month chart of XLE, the SPX energy sector.  Now take a look at a six-month chart of XLB, the SPX raw materials sector.  Compare those with a six-month chart of the financial (XLF) or consumer discretionary (XLY) sector.  What we're seeing is a concentration of risk-taking among large institutions into those industries that will provide the basic materials for the AI boom.  (Note similar strength among a number of the commodities and in the commodity index DBC overall).  Other sectors of the market are not in decline, but have not been going much of anywhere for the last few months.  

This is an example of thematic diversification.  Large institutional investors base their investment decisions on themes that are supported by economic data, fundamental data within industries and companies, and by geopolitical developments.  When they detect new themes, they often will shift funds out of certain assets and sectors of the market and into others.  This thematic diversification requires active traders to track where funds are flowing, so that they can ride those waves.  By trading different themes that are gaining interest, we are most likely to exploit opportunity even in overall markets that have been relatively flat.

Diversification enables us to go where the action is.

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2/11/2026 - Here's a simple example of how developing traders can diversify their trading and adapt to shifting market conditions.  Since the summer of 2010, when I first began collecting the data, the correlation between the day's range in SPY and the VIX for that day has been .76.  Think about what that means.  To a statistically significant level, if we know how options are pricing volatility (VIX), we can anticipate the amount of directional movement within the trading day.  Moreover, the SPY volume for that day correlates quite significantly with the size of the day's trading range.  

What does that mean in practice?  As we move forward in the trading day, we can track the relative volume of the market (how the volume for each minute of trading compares with the average volume for that minute) and we can track the level and direction of VIX.  That tells us in real time whether we're likely to experience a day of big moves or a relatively narrow, choppy day.  We can then adjust our trading accordingly--but only if we have diverse trading strategies:  some that make money in momentum/breakout conditions, some that make money in reversal conditions, etc.  

Like the football or basketball team, we see how the opponent's defense is aligned and we use that information to call the trading plays most likely to work.  That can only happen if we have a diverse playbook to draw from:  different edges for different situations.  Once we develop such a playbook, the result is a sense of mastery:  a positive trading psychology.

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2/10/2026 - Diversification, as explained below, means that we treat each day, week, month, and year as a portfolio of activities that are meaningful to us and that draw upon our best characteristics.  There may be ups and downs in our relationships, in our P/L, in our health, etc., but over the entire life portfolio we are generating positivity.  Putting all of our eggs in one basket leaves us vulnerable to blowups--in markets and in life.

But we achieve diversification over the course of our lifetimes as well.  A career that is rewarding and fulfilling at one phase of life may give way to a different one as we mature.  The joy of a romantic relationship will evolve into the joy of raising a family.  I began my career as a full-time faculty member at a medical school and greatly enjoyed coordinating counseling services for the students.  Over time, as my interest in markets grew, I saw that many of the approaches to psychology that I had been teaching and applying could be very relevant to helping traders with their performance.  Still later, I began applying these methods not only to trading firms, but investment banks and large hedge funds.  What might look like a happy and successful career is actually a succession of careers.

What that means is that if we are to live diversified lives, we have to be able to let go of one set of activities to move on to others.  In a very important sense, every life activity--including trading--needs a stop level.  If we never stop out of what we're doing, we never transition to what can lie ahead.  Becoming too attached to any life activity--including trading--prevents us from finding what we're meant to be doing.  As I mentioned during our visit to Devon in Colorado, the point at which we grow old is the point at which we determine our best years are behind us.  Only when we can stop out of activities that we outgrow can we rejuvenate with fresh challenges.

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2/9/2026 - One of the greatest mistakes traders make is working on their development by focusing on their negative emotions and performance.  If you keep emphasizing everything you do wrong, you eventually internalize the sense of being a f*ck up.  Correcting errors is certainly necessary for performance improvement, but it is not sufficient.  

A major theme of the Positive Trading Psychology book that will be coming out later this month is that we grow by leveraging our strengths and finding ways to trade that draw upon the best of who we are.  Every truly successful trader I've worked with has succeeded by bringing talents and skills from previous accomplishments and adapting these to markets.  When we draw upon what we do best and what means the most to us, our efforts give energy--and that energizes our creative search for opportunity.

So how is this related to diversification?  All of us possess a portfolio of experiences, skills, and abilities.  Life success comes from drawing upon these in everything we do:  relationships, leisure activity, career efforts, trading, family life, etc.  A way of viewing this diversification is to ask:  What will make today a great success even if my P/L is down for the day?  A diversified life gives us so many ways to win that each day brings us energy and well-being.  

How we live eventually shapes how we trade.  

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2/8/2026 - Investors and active day traders achieve diversification differently.  An investor creates a portfolio of positions with positive expected return, where these positions are not highly correlated with one another.  One bet might be on economic strength in emerging markets vs. developed markets and could be expressed with a position that is long EEM and short SPX.  Another bet might be a long position in crude oil, expressing a view of economic growth/demand and weather-related demand.  Capital is divided among these different positions, so that the combination can make money even if individual views prove incorrect.  This diversification requires knowledge of multiple markets/stocks and strategies.  Its goal is not only solid absolute returns, but a smooth curve of returns buffering losses (i.e., high Sharpe ratio).

The active day trader achieves diversification by trading many instruments in a given day and trading different patterns among those instruments.  Thus, I could be long the ES futures on an anticipated morning breakout and then I could trade an individual stock short based on flows moving out of its sector and toward others.  Still another trade might be a volatility bet expressed through options by purchasing a straddle.  Diversification is achieved sequentially rather than simultaneously in a portfolio.

Understanding how diversification balances our returns helps us appreciate how diversification balances our mindset.  When we have multiple ways to adapt to ever-changing markets, we achieve a higher level of control over our returns.  One of the most common--and least appreciated--sources of emotional disruption of trading is our rigidity: our failure to adapt to shifting opportunity sets in markets.

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2/6/2026 - We get married to benefit from a concentrated investment.  We have friends, family, and colleagues to benefit from multiple investments, each of which pays off uniquely.  Together, our concentrated efforts and our diverse efforts make for a deep life and a broad and stimulating life.  

So it is within our careers.  To succeed, we typically need to concentrate on an area of expertise where we bring unique depth and value.  We also have to apply our knowledge broadly enough to ensure that we're learning from new challenges and applying our expertise as widely as possible.  

Success is a function of breadth and depth.  We need enough variety to keep life interesting and stimulating; we need enough depth to make our efforts not just successful, but meaning-full.

I've been hearing from a number of portfolio managers and traders who have benefited recently from concentrated bets in growth areas of the stock market, but who have been losing money lately.  This has shaken their confidence and will make it difficult to reengage when opportunity arises.  So much of what happens in the stock market--and across global equity, currency, and rates markets--is a rotation of assets out of one area and into others.  Notice in the US stock market how raw materials and energy shares have been strong, but tech stocks have been weak.  Just a matter of months ago, that was hardly the case!

Diversification means that we have the tools to find opportunity in multiple markets and the flexibility to deploy resources in those different areas.  When we don't just have an edge, but a set of edges that are unique (not highly correlated with one another), we create a much smoother equity curve.  Balancing the ups and downs of our returns is crucial to preserving a positive psychology.  

The more we can achieve consistency of returns, the more likely it will be that we can maintain a consistent mindset.