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.