Best Practices For Coaching Our Own Trading

 

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.