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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What Is The Best Way To Learn Trading?

 

8/21/2026 - Yesterday's post focused on some of the shortcomings that we see in the education and training of traders.  Much of that training is conducted online, because that is what creates scale--and income--for the instructors.  But is that ideal for generating trading success?  Let's take a look at professional trading firms and see how they train their talent.

The first big difference at hedge funds and similar trading organizations is that new talent is hired.  Typically they are hired by a team and typically they report to a more experienced, senior team member who supervises their efforts.  At a hedge fund, they are hired as junior analysts, tasked with the responsibility for gathering the information needed for the team to make informed trading decisions.  Thus, for example, at a fund trading individual stocks, the junior analysts will follow a group of companies within an industry and stay on top of earning reports, news developments, and communications with the managements of their companies to identify when the stocks of those companies are compelling buys, holds, or sells.

Here is what's key:  The junior analyst is hired because they have some skill set/talent that is valued by the team.  For instance, they might have programming skills, statistical analysis experience, or relevant experience from an internship during their education.  They apply their skills and experience to their work, but they are always supervised by a senior analyst.  That senior analyst reads and reviews all of their work and provides feedback about good ideas, not so good ideas, and further research that needs to be done.  Thus there is constant feedback about idea generation and the improvement of the quality of ideas.  Such supervision and mentoring lies at the heart of learning and professional development.

Teams are mentoring factories.  This lies at the heart of their success in producing trading talent.

The treatment teams in medical schools consist of a senior (attending) physician, senior resident physicians training in their specialties, junior residents supervised by the seniors, and medical students supervised by the junior residents.  "Each one teach one" is the motto.  We learn by teaching and we learn by being taught...at higher and higher levels of responsibility.  Elite training is never accomplished in isolation.

The intensive training within trading teams typically includes both fundamental analysis (factors impacting the demand for the company's goods and services) and technical analysis (factors reflecting demand and supply for the company's stock).  The idea is to be more rapid than the competition in identifying when a fundamentally solid investment is now in demand, as well as when an investment that has been in demand is now no longer compelling in its fundamentals.  These ideas are conveyed to the portfolio managers, who are responsible for taking the research and ideas from the analysts and turning those into actual trades in the team's portfolio.

Thus, both the junior and senior analysts have the opportunity to see how their work translates into actual trades and P/L.

So, what we see is that the first principle in learning how to trade is understanding what goes into good trades and then practicing idea generation with intensive supervision, feedback, and mentoring.  When the junior analysts become sufficiently experienced and successful, they are promoted to the role of senior analysts.  They share their ideas more directly with the portfolio managers, and they take on juniors for supervision.  Learners progress by becoming mentors.  In the next post, we'll see how these learners/mentors get to the point of actually trading their ideas--and we'll look at how individual traders can gain the benefits of team-based training.

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8/20/2026 - Over the years, there has been no lack of books, websites, videos, and courses promising to bring trading success to developing traders.  Indeed, we're flooded with offerings from aspiring gurus, promoting videos that outline market patterns, illustrated with handpicked examples.  Soon we'll see more of these patterns offered by AI tools, alerting traders to trends, breakouts, etc.

So why aren't these offerings more successful?  If a successful trader is teaching methodologies to developing traders, why don't those traders come close to replicating that trader's claimed success?  A common answer is that the aspiring traders need to develop their psychology as well as their trading methods.  They are not succeeding because of their lack of discipline.

But what if we were to take the patterns taught by the gurus and automate them so that there is perfect discipline?  Or what if we were to program the patterns and actually assess profits, losses, drawdowns, etc.?  I've performed this exercise a few times and the results are discouraging.  The patterns that are taught work in certain market environments and not in others, ultimately resulting in unacceptable drawdowns.

This makes sense.  If drawing lines on charts and finding simple "setups" consistently made meaningful money, those would be rapidly exploited with those who have the funds and programming expertise to take advantage of the opportunities.  When I first began working at professional trading firms, particularly large hedge funds, I was struck by the fact that none of the best traders used methods similar to those taught online.

None.

The professional traders understood *why* markets move and thus don't rely on charts and indicators that reflect movement but don't *explain* it.  In this series of posts, I will make an effort to explain how professional traders learn trading and how we can learn from their example.

How Well Do You Coach Your Own Trading Performance?

 

8/19/2026 - An important test of how well we coach ourselves is how we respond to losing periods in markets.  The book Best Loser Wins is very important in this regard.  The subtitle of that text reads:  "Why Normal Thinking Never Wins the Trading Game".  Normal thinking avoids pain and avoids loss.  It's normal to hang onto trades that go against us, not wanting to lock in a loss.  When we examine the trading of the best traders, however, we find that they are very good at losing.  When they see that their ideas aren't working, they're quick to exit and limit their losses.  When those ideas do work, they're quick to take profits on a portion of their position but also willing to let the rest of the trade run--and perhaps even add to the position.  The result is that the average size of their winning trades far exceeds the average size of the losers.  Ironically, the best losers end up becoming the greatest winners.

Where self-coaching comes in is that the best traders not only endure losses, but actively *learn* from them.  If a well-researched idea isn't playing out in price action, something else is going on.  That something else is a market driver and will trap unaware participants.  For instance, perhaps the stock market is not reacting as usual to growth news because commodities, especially oil, and yields are on the rise, suggesting an inflationary environment.  The losing trade quickly stimulates a fresh look at markets and often a new, promising trade.  The loss was a price paid for learning and can result in a much larger profit.

In short, the mindset of the successful trader is not so much positive or negative as it is resilient.  When we coach ourselves to find opportunity following losses, we exercise that resilience.

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8/18/2026 - In the last post, we looked at how relative volume provides important information for understanding market movement and planning our trades.  Because volume is so highly correlated with volatility (+.66 during 2026), tracking volume in real time can help us anticipate likely movement and thoughtfully establish targets for our trades.

Yet another facet of the market microsystem that helps us coach our own trading is how market components are moving concurrently with the overall market.  If we're trading stock index futures, for example, and we see the market break out of a range higher, we want to quickly look at the NYSE TICK and see how many stocks are ticking higher (i.e., lifting offers) on the move.  That tells us a great deal about the breadth of buying interest.  We also want to glance how various market sectors are behaving on the breakout.  Is this a broad move higher, likely reflecting a trend, or is this rotational action impacting some sectors and not others?  

Finally, we want to see how other markets are trading at the time our market is breaking from its range.  Is the move occurring in asset classes other than stocks, such as interest rates and currencies, or is this an idiosyncratic move specific to equities?  If it's a broad move across asset classes, this can be a great signal that large institutions are deploying capital across macro themes--a development which should help price movement persist.

Who is in the market helps determine how the market moves.  A good coach, like a good football quarterback, sees the entire field and calls plays based on what they see.  A great deal of trading failure occurs when we get run over by the big picture that we never see.

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8/17/2026 - The previous post suggested that every market exists within an ecosystem and that successful trading of a market requires an understanding of that ecosystem.  We can think of price action and volume as the market's "text".  The ecosystem is what surrounds and determines price and volume behavior:  the "context".  Understanding--and genuine conviction--occurs when we can place the market's text in proper context.

Let's say that we are trading the SPX Index via SPY or stock index futures.  The first piece of context is how the market is trading compared with how it has typically traded *at that time of day*.  So, for instance, is volume at today's opening bars significantly higher, lower, or similar to typical volume during those bars over the past month or so?  *Who* is in the market determines how much the market can move and how it is likely to move.  Who is in the market also tells you who you are trading against, and that tells you how the market is likely to move.

A simple exercise is to identify the best couple of trading opportunities each day over an extended period of time and then check out those opportunities as a function of the market volume traded on each occasion.  You'll see that the ideal "setups" occur differently when you're trading in markets dominated by institutions and those dominated by smaller participants.  Developing traders who don't understand context won't realize why the patterns that had been working for them now aren't working.  They'll become frustrated, and that will hurt their trading.  But the problem is not predominantly psychological.  It's a failure to understand market context.

More to come.

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8/16/2026 - So what does trading have in common with photography and how is that relevant to coaching our own trading performance?  The above photo of a bee eating and pollinating a flower was sent to me by Dr. Corinne Masur, a psychology colleague and an accomplished photographer.  It's a beautiful picture of a beautiful act:  the bee feeds from the nectar, while pollen sticks to its body.  When the bee moves to another plant for eating, the pollen falls off onto the new flower, enabling the new plant to grow and flourish.  The bees and flowers thus live in a mutually beneficial ecosystem.  Understanding the bee requires an appreciation of that ecosystem.

When Dr. Masur described what it takes to capture such a beautiful photo, she said that it requires the ability to stand in one spot for a long period of time.  That immediately made sense to me.  The perfect shot doesn't just suddenly appear.  The photographer sees a promising opportunity and waits for the right shot, framing it to capture the subject and its surroundings.

Great traders have a detailed understanding of an ideal market situation to exploit, from the big picture to the moment-to-moment activity.  They then have "the ability to stand in one spot for a long period of time", patiently waiting for phenomenal reward relative to risk.  Those are the opportunities to size up, and they don't come along all the time.  Trading without the ability to stand in one spot--and the knowledge of what to look for across time frames--*is* overtrading.

What many traders don't understand is that each market exists within an ecosystem.  It's understanding that ecosystem that that helps us trade the opportunity properly.  Simply looking at price bars and chart data misses the ecosystem.  It would be like looking at the bee and missing the flower.  The next post will explain how to coach ourselves to identify market ecosystems.

This post is written in honor of Victor Niederhoffer, who understood nature and ecosystems and their relationship to markets.

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8/14/2026 - It's often assumed that the role of trading psychology is to help us follow our plans and execute our setups.  That is not how experienced traders and portfolio managers coach themselves.

Consider a basketball team preparing for an important game against a talented rival.  A significant amount of time is spent watching game films, stopping the films at key points, and learning lessons from those occasions.  It is those lessons that are then practiced on the court, building awareness and skills that can take advantage of the rival's weaknesses.

For instance, the films might show that the opposing team is slow to rotate their zone defense when the ball is passed cross court.  This sets up open jump shots from the perimeter.  In practice, then, the team will rehearse rapid cross court passing to take advantage of the opponent's slow adaptation.  

How does this relate to markets?  The market is the opponent, and the "films" we review are how the market has recently traded.  We track volume/volatility; we track which markets have been correlated with our market; and we track which sectors of the market have been strongest and weakest.  We then identify opportunities that have appeared in these recent markets and how we can best take advantage of them.  Our practice is rehearsing how we'll trade patterns that are likely to recur in today's trade.

But what if today's market trades differently from recent markets due to news and/or impacts of other markets?  That's when we call a timeout and quickly adapt by *not* following our previous plans and by seeing--in real time--how opportunities are setting up.  We may even be able to identify markets from the past that have traded similarly and reviewed how we successfully traded them.

In other words, self-coaching sometimes means intentionally not following our plans in order to adapt to new/different market conditions.  Self-coaching is preparation and training, and sometimes that means making real time changes in what we do and how we do it.

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8/13/2026 - We are always coaching ourselves.  Some of us do it in a conscious, planned fashion and others do it randomly.  Our self-talk *is* our self-coaching.  We are always talking to ourselves about what we're doing, what we have done, and what we should do.  That internal voice is the coach within us.

That is why it's a great test to ask ourselves:  Would I want someone else to talk to me the way I speak to myself?  Would I speak to a good friend or colleague the way I speak to myself?  If the answers to these questions are no, then it's likely that our self-talk (our self-coaching) is sabotaging us.

The reality is that informed, constructive self-talk, like informed, constructive trading, is something that has to be learned, practiced, and cultivated.  We need to work on our self-coaching every bit as much as we work on our trading, because we're looking for mastery in both domains.  

Yes, we can hire trading coaches and we can sit on trading floors and listen to team leaders and managers guide us.  But if we simply rely on others as our coaches, we won't necessarily learn the skills and develop the tools for effectively coaching ourselves.  It starts with the quality of our self-talk and whether we're challenging and inspiring ourselves or draining ourselves of vital motivation.

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8/12/2026 - Why aren't we more successful in coaching ourselves to success?  As noted below, structure is vital.  If our coaching is irregular or if it's a mere add-on to our day's activity--something to get over and done--then it can't truly be internalized to change who we are and what we do.  A great question is whether we review our trading/performance with the same intensity that we follow and trade markets.  When we read about the Market Wizards, it becomes clear that they study markets and performance for long, intensive hours.  That helps them internalize what they learn.

But another reason self-coaching is not successful is that it leaves out a key dimension of learning:  emotion.  If we look at successful coaches in sports and performance fields, they don't simply go over performance in rote, routine ways with performers.  They motivate.  They push for more and more, better and better.  Think of locker room talks by basketball and football coaches.  Think of the coaching of Olympic stars.  The role of the coach is to inspire greater and greater performance.

How well do you inspire yourself in your self-coaching?  How well do you motivate yourself?  If your reviewing and planning are emotionless, routine processes, can they really push you to greater and greater achievement?

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8/11/2026 - Every trader is their own coach:  how we talk to ourselves and how we spend time previewing and reviewing markets *is* our self-coaching.  A worthwhile question to ask is:  If we coached a new trader in the way we coach ourselves, how well would they develop?  Alternatively, if we coached someone in the gym the way we coach our own trading, how well would they develop?  Many traders are far too informal in their self-coaching, so that they never truly challenge themselves and grow.

The first dimension of successful self-coaching is structure.  We don't hesitate to structure our trade ideas, spelling out entries, exits, sizing criteria, etc.  But how well do we structure our own coaching?  What kind of notes do we take before trading starts, during trading, and after?  How do we draw upon these notes to identify what we saw well and what we missed?  How do we review the trades that we took to see how well we could improve what we did?  How do we turn that review into action plans for the next day?

Look at workouts and practice sessions among sports teams or after action reviews by military squads.  There is nothing informal about it.  There is structure and there is purpose.  Everything is geared to improve performance going forward.  The coaching is motivational:  sometimes encouraging, sometimes a kick in the behind.  But there is always structure, going over performance in detail to highlight what we do well and what we could do better.    

What Separates The Best Traders From The Rest

 

8/9/2026 - I'm seeing a widening gap between traders and money managers who make active and innovative use of AI and those that do not.  The first generation of AI applications was all about number crunching and assembling written information on a given topic from a number of places.  This turned AI into a virtual trading analyst, a kind of super search engine that not only collated data but made sense of it.  Thus, a simple query can quickly pull together economic data from around the world (growth, employment) and identify which countries and regions of the world are expanding and which are not.  Similarly, the AI engine can pull together data from individual companies--earnings, revenues, expenses--and quickly identify patterns of growth and stagnation.

The newer applications of AI are studying traders themselves and identifying patterns in profitability and drawdowns.  For instance, once the AI is fed the P/L data for a trader, it can identify profitability as a function of market movement, market volatility, time of day, position sizing, etc.  Once patterns of profitability are identified, they can be tracked in real time, alerting a trader to market conditions that have been more and less profitable in the past.

If you know that you're in an environment that has been profitable in the past, you can size up positions.  If you know that you're in an unfavorable environment, you take pull back risk taking.  Suddenly AI has gone from being an analyst to being a real time coach.  That is a game changer.

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8/8/2026 - What is your relationship to time?  Some people spend a good amount of their time moving from activity to activity without any overarching plan or purpose.  Others keep a calendar to structure their priorities and get important things accomplished.  Still others utilize time to prioritize activities that actively challenge them and grow various strengths.  These three ways of relating to time occur in our personal lives, our relationships, our work lives, and in our involvements with markets.  

When we develop ourselves, we expand our capacity for intentional action and that moves us from random ways of spending time to planned activities that expand our capacities.  The best traders I have worked with are masters of time.  They not only get things done, but also prioritize activities that push them to grow.  

When we are at the gym and comfortable lifting a given weight on the machine, it's time to move the weight higher.

The best traders are always on machines and always moving past their levels of comfort.

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8/7/2026 - Back in December, 2010, I wrote the following for the SpecList discussion group led by Victor Niederhoffer.  The key idea is that, for someone who has done their homework, frustration and the taking of losses is valuable information.  It is when markets are changing that the old, winning trades no longer work--and that is when we can adapt ahead of the crowd and create new winning trades.  I heartily recommend all of Vic's writings to developing traders:

Maslow one commented that, when all you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as a nail.  So it is with psychologists that involve themselves in markets.  Lacking an understanding of actual speculative strategies and tactics--not to mention portfolio construction--they reduce performance problems to the lowest, psychological denominator.  In so doing, they confuse cause and effect:  they observe frustrated traders and assume that relieving frustration is the key to making money.

The professional speculator, unlike the retail daytrader, rarely falls into performance problems because of derelict discipline or runaway emotions.  Rather, it is the very competence of the professional that leads to performance challenges.  It is when pros are most in sync with markets, identifying and profiting from themes and patterns, that they are most vulnerable to ever-changing patterns of direction, volatility, and correlation.  The confidence that permits healthy risk-taking under the best of speculative conditions inevitably gives way to confusion and frustration when skilled participants are no longer in sync with their markets.

The wise speculator utilizes this confusion and frustration as information:  they often are early signs that something meaningful has shifted in the marketplace.  The proper intervention in such circumstances is not to quell the frustration with psychological exercises.  Rather, it is to extract the information from the situation and feed that forward into strategy and tactics.  Very often, today's bad trade was a good trade in yesterday's regime:  there is information in that.

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8/6/2026 - An interesting question that came up during last evening's webinar was what to do if your trading system, which has backtested well, now shows a string of five or six losses.  Should you stop trading?  Should you continue to trust your edge?  And how can you control the emotions associated with such a drawdown?

My response is that successful traders don't have "an edge" in their trading.  They have many ways of making money in different market environments.  A simple example would be to track relative volume (whether volume at a given time of day is average, high, or low) and study, study, study how markets move in different volume regimes.  What you'll see is that there are different edges in markets with different volumes, because you're trading against different market participants.  How the market moves depends, in part, on who is in the market.

So now we can go back to the question and see the premise that needs to be checked, as Ms. Rand would say.  When we have a string of losses on trades that have been consistently profitable, it's a likely sign that the market has changed.  When we look at volume closely, we might detect that change.  When we look at what is moving with the market, we might see a change (for example, interest rates are moving higher along with commodities and the US dollar is weakening, all suggesting higher odds of inflation).  The string of losses are telling us to step back, reassess, and find a fresh edge in that new environment.

The losses are information.  They are like physical pain, a warning sign that something is amiss.  If we have an edge--and only one edge--we will be vulnerable to changing market conditions and that will take a toll on our emotions--and our bottom lines.

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8/5/2026  - Here are some challenging questions to ask yourself about your trading.  I'll be touching on these in the webinar this evening (see below):

*  What do you see in markets that other traders don't focus on?

*  What are the opportunities that you pursue in markets that provide you with unique returns (i.e., profits that others don't pursue)?

*  What is unique about how you review markets and performance that helps you learn and internalize unique lessons?

*  How well do you track changes in markets and adapt to them ?

The idea that you can trade the same chart patterns and indicator readings as everyone else and outperform them simply because you maintain a better psychology is absolute nonsense.  Read the Market Wizards books and you'll see that the great traders are uniquely successful because they're doing unique things.

A great psychology comes from pursuing trading entrepreneurially and maintaining the excitement of discovering and doing new and unique things.

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8/4/2026 - This Wednesday (August 6th) at 7 PM ET, I'll be participating in a trading psychology webinar with Peter Robbins and Agnieszka Wood.  It will be a great opportunity to delve into what drives the best traders and how they are able to sustain high levels of performance day after day, week after week, for an entire career.  Here's a link for the (free) registration.

In my portion of the program, I'll go into some detail regarding the research review I'm doing to identify the dimensions of elite trading success.  Here's a very simple example:  A developing trader saved charts on multiple time frames of the market he was interested in and reviewed these to identify how the best trades each day set up across a variety of indicators.  He not only took copious notes, but replayed each of the days and time frames to get a feel for how those setups looked in real time.

Every day.  For many months.  

He figured out that how buy and sell signals set up is different in slow and busy markets.

So now he developed ways of identifying when days were slow, medium, and busy and developed what Mike Bellafiore calls "playbooks" for the different kinds of markets.

But then he figured out that, within slow, medium, and busy days, there were differences in how markets move depending upon whether market components were moving in a single direction or moving in different directions.  So he identified signals for slow, medium, and busy days depending upon what was moving and how.

All of this took many months of immersed study and review and painstaking note taking.  He is now a highly successful money manager who leads a successful team.

Creative thinking.  Deep practice.  Immersion.  Resilience.  

This is what makes greatness in any field.

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8/3/2026 - Back in 2002, I wrote that "The only way to stand on the shoulders of giants is to hoist them on our own".  What I meant by that is that, in honoring our own heroes and heroines, we internalize some of their heroic dimensions and elevate ourselves.  When we explore the lives of great traders, we find that they not only have good teachers, but they have had role models that they deeply value and respect.  In learning from their heroes, they absorb something of the heroic themselves.  The greatness that they perceive in their mentors becomes the foundation for their own quests.

This is why effective education and training is conveyed through the medium of dedicated relationships.  The best traders have had the best role models and synthesize their influence into their unique styles of finding and exploiting opportunity.  Books, videos, and social media messages can be helpful, but cannot replace the dynamic of finding our own heroes and hoisting them on our shoulders by internalizing their greatness.

As noted in the previous post, when mentors are our heroes, our pursuit of trading goes from being a challenge to embodying a quest.  No one will work hard enough to absorb the subtleties of markets unless their motivation reaches the level of inspiration.  If you can't find greatness in your teacher, it's unlikely you'll be able to elevate yourself by standing on their shoulders--and it's unlikely that you'll be sufficiently inspired to hoist them on your own.

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8/2/2026 - I once noted that the point at which we grow old is the point at which we decide that the best of life is behind us.  It could be at age 30, 50, 70, or never.  A youthful mindset is one in which we perceive a bright future and decide to pursue it.  That could be in markets, in relationships, or in our work efforts; it could be in all of these.  When we fight for the future, as Ayn Rand pointed out, we live in it today.  The brightness of the future we work toward illuminates each of our days.  

In the Trading Psychology 3.0 book that I'm currently writing, I review the large number of books written either about or by accomplished traders.  What is clear as I research is that the great traders pursue markets not merely as a career or even as a passion, but as a quest.  When we are on a quest, we dedicate ourselves to a noble and inspiring end.  P/L by itself is not a quest.  For the greats, the true quest is for mastery and understanding.  Profitability is simply a way of keeping score.  

When we pursue our quest, our lives become ones of purpose, meaning, challenge, and fulfillment.  Our efforts give us energy:  they inspire us.  We look forward to each day--and that is the mindset of those who remain perpetually passionate, ever-youthful, knowing that the rest of their lives will be the best of their lives.