9/30/2026 - On Wednesday, October 7th at 4:15 PM ET (after the NY stock market close), I will hold the first in a series of free monthly webinars going into depth into the topic of how to coach yourself to trading success. The goal is not to get you to employ me. The goal is to build your trading psychology to the point where you don't need to employ me!
Attendance will be limited. I will send a Zoom link to participants the day before the webinar. The session will go from 45 minutes to an hour and will feature presentation, discussion, and Q&A. To sign up, please email me at steenbab at aol dot com. There will be a separate sign up process each month.
Thanks for your interest!
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9/29/2026 - An exercise that I describe in The Daily Trading Coach is unusually effective in interrupting and shifting our negative thought patterns related to trading. It is easy to become frustrated during the trading day as we miss opportunities, take losses, and fail to reach our goals. Out of that frustration, we can talk to ourselves in negative, self-critical ways: "I'm such an idiot"; "I'll never become successful"; "What is wrong with me?"
Notice the important reframing in the above paragraph. Our negative thinking is negative self-talk. We are actively speaking to ourselves in destructive, hurtful ways. That distracts us, and it discourages us. It robs us of the energy and enthusiasm needed to sustain great learning curves.
Most of us, despite these bouts of negative thought, basically feel good about ourselves. After all, that's why we want to succeed in trading and in other aspects of life! We are not depressed human beings who are chronically mired in negativity and self-blame. We can use that fact to our advantage.
All we need to do is imagine someone else (preferably someone we don't like!) saying those negative things to us. How would we feel if someone stood over us as we traded and put us down, told us we'd never succeed, etc.? The odds are good that we would tell the person to shut up and respond that setbacks and failure are part of the learning curve! In other words, we wouldn't accept the negativity.
This is a great exercise for coaching ourselves. As soon as we start to think negatively, we want to vividly imagine another person who wants to sabotage us saying those things to us. And we want to push back! By rehearsing the push backs, we can ensure that our periods of negative emotionality become exercises in building ourselves up.
We can train our self-talk.
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9/28/2026 - What should I do when emotions emerge during my trading and threaten to affect my actions? This is a question recently asked by a trader, and it's a good question. Notice that the trader has already made the important step of self-awareness by recognizing that he was getting emotional during the trade. Without that self-awareness, there is no way that we can shift and intensify our focus. As I've shared in the past, a great way to build that self-awareness is to take our "emotional temperature" every hour during the trading day. Are you running hot emotionally or cool? Are you focused or distracted? Are you overexcited or discouraged? Identifying how you're feeling is the first step in shifting our mindsets.
Notice that the goal is not to replace negative emotions with positive ones. The goal is to replace emotional distraction with intensive focus. It is in the focused state that we see markets more clearly and respond to them promptly in planned ways. A great exercise when you become distracted is to take a short break away from the screens, close your eyes, regulate your breathing so that you're breathing deeply and slowly, and then--in detail--visualize yourself acting correctly at each step of the trading process. You are calming and focusing yourself *while* immersing yourself in a movie of you trading well.
What such an exercise accomplishes is the cognitive and emotional connection between being focused and trading well. As you build that connection, the deep breathing and state of focus place you in a zone in which all the right trading practices naturally come to you. Quite literally you're building new habit patterns, but anchoring them to the state of calm focus. Then, when you enter the right state, you naturally do the right things.
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9/27/2026 - What does it take to be successful as an Olympic athlete or as an entrepreneur? First and foremost, it takes commitment. Success is not simply a function of motivation. It requires a sustained intention to get better and better, fueled by a vision of greatness. We don't need to push ourselves if we're truly pulled by a vision. And we will never achieve greatness as an athlete or as an entrepreneur if we are not focused on great performance each practice session, each day.
This was a major takeaway from the review of the Market Wizard books that I conducted as part of writing my next book. The great traders are "all in". They push and push to refine and perfect each aspect of trading: how they gather and assemble information into trade ideas; how they select what to trade to best capture their ideas, how they express and size their trades, how they enter the trades, how they manage the risk, how they exit, how they review their performance. Each facet of trading deserves careful scrutiny and practice: the goal is to perform each trade with greatness.
Mike Bellafiore explained that the developing trader needs to work on making One Good Trade. Greatness is passion for process. That can only be accomplished if we truly love what we do and are pulled by a vision of what can be.
How we approach trading shapes our trading psychology. A great way to become your own trading psychologist is to focus, focus, focus on just placing one good trade and doing each part of the process well. Then make a second good trade that learns from what you did well the first time and makes improvements in what you did. Then focus on what it takes to make one good trading day. One good trading week. Rinse and repeat...the goal is not to trade; the goal is to make your trading a consistent expression of who you are at your best.
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9/25/2026 - A wise reader pointed out that journaling might be necessary to shape our self-coaching, but it is not sufficient. Every journal entry needs to finish with action steps: a checklist of essential to-do items for the coming trading session. There are positive to-do's, things we've done well that we want to repeat and extend, and there are corrective to-do's for the things we want to improve. In each case, the checklist *details* how we are going to accomplish these goals. It's not enough to simply say, "I'm going to work on better entries". You need to elaborate how, specifically, you're going to improve your entry execution. Your journal thus becomes a detailed action plan for the day.
Recall the best practice mentioned yesterday of talking the journal aloud and recording yourself after market hours and then listening to your recording to start your morning. Now you have your morning coach talking to you and outlining what you need to do and how you need to do it. The checklist becomes a coaching talk, just like a team gets before gametime. That shapes your mindset and focuses your efforts.
Now let's take it one step further. Suppose you take a break midday, thus dividing your trading into morning and afternoon sessions. You use part of your midday break for journaling! You review morning performance, identify the things you did well that you want to repeat and extend in the afternoon, and identify what, specifically, you could have done better and how you could make those improvements in the afternoon. Now your journaling becomes the kind of self-coaching that occurs at halftime among basketball or football teams!
Of course, this means that you double your journaling, double your self-coaching, and double your practice at self-talk every trading day. Journaling becomes the path to an improved headspace. It's not just writing things down; it's rehearsing a new relationship with yourself as a peak performer.
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9/24/2026 - There's an important lesson from the previous posting that is essential in understanding how we can coach our own trading psychology: Our journaling IS our coaching. How we construct our journals and make use of them is how we review and guide our performance. The trading journal is our opportunity to talk to ourselves and establish a healthy trading psychology. This is why very accomplished traders I've known and worked with record their journals after the market close and then listen to them before the market open. Listening to our reviews is getting our coaching. It turns our self-talk into coaching talk.
There is no better opportunity to work on our self talk than to actually talk to ourselves. When we talk out loud what we did well and what we need to improve, we focus ourselves--and we can also inspire and motivate ourselves. We can then also use the journal to guide ourselves through specific exercises to work on our psychology, which will be the topic of tomorrow's post.
The depth and detail of our journaling provides depth and detail to our self-coaching. Journaling is our practice at becoming our own trading psychologists.
The first of the free trading psychology webinars will be after the NYSE close, at 4:15 PM ET on Wednesday, October 7th. I will post instructions for signup as we get closer to that date. I appreciate your interest.
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9/23/2026 - OK, so let's get started with becoming your own trading coach. The very first element in coaching success is the relationship between the performer and the coach. Studies in psychology reliably show that the quality of the relationship between the helper and the person being helped is the greatest predictor of positive outcomes. Simply following techniques from a manual (or from an AI avatar!) cannot substitute for internalizing the impact of a caring relationship.
So, wait: how, then, can one become their own trading coach?
This can only occur if a trader has a healthy, positive relationship with themselves. Of course, we all become frustrated with ourselves at times, but if we have a healthy relationship with ourselves, our self-talk will be encouraging, understanding, and motivating. Think of a healthy relationship between parent and child. The good parent praises and encourages and, even when the child does the wrong things, makes sure the child feels loved. The issue is the behavior; the relationship is always positive and caring.
If you are going to be successful in coaching yourself, you first want to work on your self-talk and how you treat yourself. A useful exercise is to imagine that you are a *great* performance coach for this developing trader named "you" and you are going to talk to you the way you would talk with someone you care about and who you want to see succeed. You're going to practice, practice, practice talking to yourself constructively. Your message to yourself is, "OK, you messed up. What can we learn from this? How is this going to make us better? Let's not put this aside until we've taken away something positive from the slip-up."
Similarly, after doing something well, you want to be encouraging and supportive: "Great job! How can we build on this?" This is why it's important that your daily trading journal include highlights from the day of what you did well (that you want to continue and expand) and what you didn't do well (that you want to improve). The journal includes observations, but also concrete plans for the next day to build on strengths and correct weaknesses. In that way, journaling becomes your self-coaching.
In the next post, we'll look at an expanded use of journaling and I'll provide details about the upcoming (free) monthly webinars for those looking to mentor themselves.
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9/22/2026 - We often hear that trading success is 80 (or 90!) percent psychology. This is not even vaguely credible. It's like saying that being a successful astronaut or football quarterback is 80% psychology. I guarantee you, I can have the best emotional and cognitive state possible and if you stick me in a spaceship or a football field, the outcome will not be good! The reality is that, once we have leveraged our talents, find our niche, and develop the skills needed to make the most of that niche, then psychology is *hugely* important to success. The developing trader needs to find the trading methods right for them and then master the skills needed to succeed with those methods. That mastery will build their psychology and enable them to go for opportunities when they're present and limit losses when they're not.
Too often, traders try to make money in markets before they've gone through the mastery process. They haven't truly found their niche, and they haven't put in the screen time and practice time to master that niche. They take risk prematurely and then they lose money and become frustrated. That leads to impulsive trading and overtrading, and it creates a performance environment of fear and greed.
But fear and greed are not the issues. The issue is attempting to short circuit the process of mastering markets. If I tried to skydive after a casual introduction to the plane and parachute, I'm going to be stressed and that's going to affect my diving...perhaps fatally.
In the next series of posts, I will outline specific ways for you to master your psychology in trading. All of these will be methods that are shown to be effective in outcome research and will draw upon my teaching at the medical school in Syracuse. Then, if the interest is there, I will begin a series of monthly coaching sessions to help you coach yourself and apply the techniques to your own life and trading. Those monthly coaching sessions will be free; I will be honored to become part of your success.
More to come!!
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