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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Top Challenges Traders Have Faced This Year

 

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10/11/2026 - The real reason traders don't succeed is because of their motivation to participate in markets.  The issue is not that they lack motivation, but that their motivation comes from the wrong place.

Abraham Maslow, the humanistic psychologist, distinguished between *growth* motivation and *deficit* motivation.

If I am drawn to an action because of growth motivation, then I become excited by growth.  New experiences, new challenges, new skills--all make me more than I currently am.  P/L may be an indication of growth over time, but the true drive comes from mastery:  getting better and better at what I'm doing.

Conversely, if I am attracted to an undertaking because of deficit motivation, then I seek to compensate for my perceived weaknesses and shortcomings.  If I feel that I haven't been a success in life, then I might look to markets to validate my worth.  What draws me to trading is not a deep interest in markets, but a deep need to overcome what I perceive I lack.

Why is this distinction *so* important to trading success?

If I'm motivated by growth, then setbacks become meaningful challenges and add to my drive to succeed.  If I'm motivated to overcome my shortcomings, losses in markets will trigger frustration, negativity, and a sense of personal failure.  It is out of those emotions that I will then trade emotionally and reactively.  

Trying to learn discipline while trading from a deficit perspective is a band-aid on the problem at best.  We first need to work on ourselves and find our direction and fulfillment before we can properly pursue markets with a growth mindset.  No amount of P/L will be good enough if we don't feel we're good enough.

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10/9/2026 - One topic that came up in the webinar was a common one:  overtrading.  Here's why that is such an important challenge to overcome:

Imagine that you were eager to meet people to develop a romantic relationship and you quickly had sexual relations with anyone you could.  After all, you have a "fear of missing out"!  So you go to bed with anyone and everyone.

Well, in fact you *would* miss out with such a strategy, because you would never develop a meaningful relationship.  Nothing cumulative comes from a series of one-night stands.  By limiting yourself to a potential partner, you now have to deal with limitations that arise by talking out differences, sharing new experiences, and learning about/accommodating the other person's uniqueness.  That's how relationships grow!

Orson Wells famously said that "The absence of limitations is the enemy of art".  What he meant is that it is precisely the limitation of the materials available to the artist that prods creativity.  If I only have two actors/actresses on stage, I now need to find fresh ways of creating action and drama.  If I only have two colors and a paintbrush, I need to think of unique ways to mix and blend and integrate those colors--and new ways to use the paintbrush!

Without constraints, we have no need for discipline or innovation.  Overtrading follows from the absence of constraints.

This is why I recommended to webinar attendees the exercise of limiting yourself to two or three trades per day if you're an active trader.  If you only have two or three trades available to you, now you need to be creative!  You need to drill down and figure out what, truly, are the two or three best opportunities each day.  That will not just make you a more disciplined trader; it will make you a better trader.

Doing less is a path to doing better.

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10/8/2026 - A major topic that I covered in yesterday's webinar was the application of the solution focus to our trading.  One of the top psychological challenges I've seen from traders this year is frustration.  Trend/momentum strategies in stocks worked well in the first half of the year--especially in those AI-related stocks--and then we saw a sizable pullback and choppy action thereafter.  Traders who kept doing what worked in the first part of the year became frustrated and discouraged subsequently.  Similarly, those trading stable interest rate regimes and benefiting from moves in relative value blew out when rates more recently began going higher and higher.  Markets changed and it was difficult for traders to adapt.

The solution focus keeps our eyes on what is working.  We want to identify what we are seeing well and doing well--even during periods of drawdown, and especially in times of drawdown!  Very often, the trades that *make* money are the ones that teach us how to succeed in current market conditions.  

One of my favorite exercises from my days of learning trading is to identify in the market(s) I'm trading the trade of the day.  What was the best move of the day and how did it set up?  Often I looked at the best move of the morning and the best move that set up during the afternoon.  I studied those moves to see how they occurred.  This helped me refine my trade selection and execution, but it also alerted me to changes in how the market was moving.  When the best trades that set up this week are quite different from those that set up last week, that is a great indication that the market has changed.

We can study what works even if we weren't in those trades.  Tracking how the market moves day after day tells us about market regimes and alerts us to when those regimes have changed.  The big challenge I see from traders this year is failure to adapt to change.

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10/7/2026 - I'll be holding the first of the free trading psychology webinars today at 4:15 PM ET and will pass along trader questions and issues that are discussed in that session.  The sessions will be held monthly, so be on the look out for signup notices for November!

One of the most common challenges I hear from developing traders arises once they have experienced initial success.  Now they want to get bigger in their risk taking.  Often, however, when they bump up their sizing, they find themselves falling back into their rookie mistakes and losing money.  How can we sustain our progress while growing our trading?

Suppose you chose to get bigger in your trading by getting broader?  In other words, if you've had success trading momentum and short-term breakouts, suppose you found mean-reversion patterns to trade in slower markets that lack momentum?  Or if you've been successful in trading the large cap stock indexes, suppose you broaden out to trade small cap and sector indexes?  When you get broader in your trading and look at more things, you grow your trading by finding more opportunities--not by sizing one thing up.  That diversification helps you make money when one market is promising and others are not--and that makes you more consistent.

Once you have broadened your trading and are making money consistently, you can *gradually* increase your sizing for all of your trades.  Consistency has to precede size.  When you are broadly consistent, you can step up your sizing by small amounts so that trades don't feel different.  By increasing size across all your trades, you preserve your balance in where you derive P/L in different markets.  

In short, focus on getting better, not bigger.  Aim for breadth and consistency of trading before size.  That builds your confidence and keeps the growth of your trading business sustainable.

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10/6/2026 - So what is the greatest psychological challenge that traders face?  I would argue that it's not what is usually discussed, such as fear, greed, and overtrading.  It's bigger than that.

The greatest psychological challenge is self-care.

We care about markets, we care about trading well, and we care about our relationships and family life.  All that is great.

Something, however, is missing.  We don't operate at peak energy and peak mindset.  It's not the presence of negatives that holds us back; it's the absence of the positives that could be energizing and inspiring us.

The easiest way to see this is in how we treat our bodies.  Do we do the things to keep ourselves in peak physical condition?  Do we treat our bodies well in how we eat, sleep, and exercise?  

Would we want to be in a relationship with someone who treats us the way we treat our bodies?

All of this was inspired by a visit to a very good massage therapist.  I found out that I was sore and stiff in ways I did not expect.  Hours and hours each day at the keyboard take their toll.  After the massage, I felt a kind of energy that I had not experienced recently.  

What if we prioritized our bodies in our work routines, our eating and drinking, our exercise?  How might that impact our psychological well-being, and how would *that* improve performance across all areas of life?

The great challenge is to treat our lives outside of trading with the same motivation and priority that we devote to markets.  That will energize all our efforts:  we care more about everything in life when we are grounded in self-care.

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10/5/2026 - Perhaps the greatest challenge traders have faced during 2026 is the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into their trading processes.  Among the teams that I work with, there has been a rapid progression in the use of AI, beginning with broad and rapid collection of news and information to expanded analytics, backtesting, and automation of trading strategies.  As this article makes clear, AI has gone from serving as an information tool to becoming a decision maker.  For the first time, I am seeing a shrinking of team sizes as AI replaces traditional roles of analysts and trading assistants.

The top challenge of AI is the broadening of the trader's scope.  In the past, a trader might screen for stocks showing particular characteristics (such as trending) and would trade one or more strategies for exploiting those characteristics.  Now, it's entirely likely that AI engines can scour multiple markets across multiple strategies turning individual traders into portfolio managers.  Why can't the stock market trader apply strategies to currency, commodities, or interest rate markets?  Why can't the trend trader of stocks now become a trader of cycling, range markets and a trader of the relative movement of stock pairs and sectors?  As AI expands the range of rapid analysis, there is no reason that a trader can't implement multiple strategies across multiple time frames thus achieving diversification and a greater number of ways of winning.

But maybe this isn't the greatest challenge of AI.  As the AI engines grow ever more powerful and flexible, the trader's discretionary role diminishes.  The ideas that are traded are the machine's ideas, not the trader's insights.  The very factors that make trading more robust may undermine what makes trading psychologically rewarding for many traders.  That is a powerful factor making traders reluctant to adopt AI, and it could make trading success increasingly challenging.

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10/4/2026 - Your struggles in trading *are* your path to growth.  What challenges you is there to change you.  Every trading struggle is highlighting what you need to do to progress.

One of the most common struggles I have heard from traders this year is the challenge of holding onto positions.  Markets have not been moving in nice, smooth trends and there has been considerable headline risk.  The trader who tries to hold onto a position for a big picture view gets whipped around and often has to exit and keep losses down before the idea can play out.  This is quite frustrating.  

What it points to in many cases is the need to develop tools for better entering and exiting trades on those shorter time frames.  As I've pointed out in the past, the opposite of a "trending" or "momentum" market is generally not a "choppy" or "untradeable" market.  The opposite of trending is cycling.  The market is trading in cycles, and many times there are multiple cycles interacting to create the feeling of choppiness.  The challenge is to use indicators/oscillators to reveal short-term peaks and valleys within the market action as guides to tactical trading.  Strategic trend following isn't working, so the key is to be nimble and tactical.

In my case, I trade stock index futures and create bars on the chart representing units of volume.  Thus, for instance, I might make each bar represent 50,000 contracts traded and I will look at where we are trading relative to moving averages of those bars.  I also have charts in front of me that are shorter-term, such as denominating the bars in 5000 contract units.  I have found that the volume-based bars normalize market activity through the trading day and produce helpful overbought/oversold signals.  Seeing how the charts based on lower volume bars are cycling is useful in finding good entry/exit points vis a vis the higher volume bars.  

Many times, we become frustrated in our trading because the meaningful patterns that are setting up in the current market are different from the patterns we're looking for.  Seeing what is happening on shorter time frames can be very useful in nimbly trading longer time periods.  Our trading challenges are there for a purpose:  to make us better by expanding/refining what we're doing.

How to Become Your Own Trading Psychologist

 

10/2/2026 - I appreciate the very strong response to Wednesday's upcoming trading psychology webinar.  I have to close registration because of the number of people signing up.  I will hold these webinars on a monthly basis and will have signups each month.  I'll also look into the possibility of recording the webinars.  Again, thank you!

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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.  Please note that 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!!

How To Build A Career In Trading

 

9/20/2026 - Many aspiring traders focus their efforts on timing:  when to buy and when to sell.  They look for patterns of price, volume, volatility to establish entry and exit signals.  What can be seen among the Market Wizards is an equal focus on *what* to be trading.  It's interesting that many successful traders have used a version of William O'Neil's framework (CANSLIM) to focus on companies that are strong fundamentally and that are demonstrating strength in relative performance.  If they are buying, they're buying the strongest companies with the best trends.  They are not looking to predict when weak stocks will become strong, and they're not just trading one thing.  Hedge fund manager Jim Roppel, who shares his trade ideas with other traders through his newsletter, is a good example of this approach.  

What these successful traders have found is that the best performing stocks have already begun their moves.  In Elliott Wave terms, they are buying the third wave of growing companies that have attracted institutional interest.  It's in that third wave that a trader can ride the potentially large moves when the crowd discovers the stock.  Traders in rates, currencies, and commodities focus on different fundamental qualities of best trades, but similarly wait for evidence that large institutional participants (which also behave in crowd-like ways) are finding the opportunity.

In short, the successful traders are not so much predicting market moves as identifying their early phases.  This can occur at very short time frames for active day traders, as in the search for "stocks in play" described by Mike Bellafiore and playbooked by the traders at SMB Capital.  First there is a screening for what is in play; only then is there a focus on how to play it.  

Success at fishing is not just about using the best rod.  You first need to know how to find the best ponds.

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9/18/2026 - Where traders go wrong in developing a trading career is that they first focus on trading.  They are eager to succeed and make money.  That short circuits the developmental process of expertise.

Consider a student who wishes to become a physician and has a passion for helping people.  Where does that student begin?  Not by immediately trying to treat patients (that would be damaging for everyone involved!), but by learning about the body, learning about health and illness, and learning about how to best help people with particular problems.  The saying in medical school is "see one, do one, teach one".  We learn by observing the work of experienced professionals, then by trying to help others with the supervision and feedback of those professionals, and then by teaching others ourselves and cementing what we've learned.  And all of that is *after* we've learned anatomy, physiology, pathology, etc.

First we learn the fundamentals (the "basic sciences" of markets); then we learn by observing markets and experienced pros; then we try trading on our own with minimal risk and get feedback on our performance; then we apply what we've learned, get larger, and eventually mentor others and solidify our expertise.

All of this is what new traders do when they begin careers at hedge funds, investment banks, and other professional settings.  The success rate of those programs is quite high, especially compared with the success rate of unstructured self help.

This is why team environments are generally the best way to learn trading.  You can watch and learn from successful traders, and you can add your own research that benefits those traders.  By studying the many books available that teach trading (see below) and teaming up with just one other learner, you can greatly improve your learning curve.  

To trade the right way, it's necessary to learn the right way.

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9/17/2026 - So where do we begin if we want to build a career in trading?  One of the most powerful observations that came from my review of the Market Wizards books--and books by the Wizards--is that success came from deep, prolonged immersion in markets.  The Wizards spent long hours each day following markets closely--and then spent more hours reviewing performance and reviewing and previewing markets.  This is training in pattern recognition, as the immersed trader sees more things more times and eventually internalizes those patterns.

Among books that illustrate patterns to look for in markets is The Trader's Handbook mentioned in yesterday's post; Mark Minervini's Trade Like a Stock Market Wizard; The Logical Trader by Mark Fisher; and The Lifecycle Trade by Eve Boboch, Kathy Donnelly, Eric Krull, and Kurt Daill.  It is quite unusual for a hedge fund manager to write a newsletter for traders outlining what to trade and how to trade it, but The Roppel Report by Jim Roppel is precisely that.  A great collection of videos from experienced market participants can be found on the SMB Capital YouTube channel, many of which detail trading patterns from different perspectives.

What will happen when you immerse yourself in the patterns described in these sources is that you'll discover ways of thinking about markets that make unique sense to you and--most important of all--you'll pull these patterns together in ways that make unique sense to you.  In other words, your trading style will be an integration of what you learn from your mentors.

A trader develops confidence, not just through positive thinking, but through cultivating his or her unique ways of viewing markets that ground their decision making.

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9/16/2026 - Right now, we have more resources to guide our trading success than ever before.  Books have been written about great traders and by great traders.  Yes, there is more distraction than ever before from tweets, videos, and courses from gurus.  But the landscape is rich with quality mentoring from traders with proven track records.  

I am currently writing an updated version of my Trading Psychology 2.0 book.  An important part of the update is a review of the major works of great traders over the past decade or so.  Over the past month I have immersed myself in all the Market Wizards books, as well as books written by such Wizards as Linda Raschke and Mark Minervini.  When I encounter an important insight, I bookmark the text.  When I finish the book, I review all the bookmarked passages.

Day after day, reading the greats and about the greats, we begin to internalize their lessons.  The first step in building a career in trading is surrounding yourself with trading greatness.  That could be in a legit trading community, and it could be by immersing ourselves in the works of successful traders.  Once we learn about their psychology and approaches to trading, we can begin to emulate their best practices.  A great place to start that phase of our development is The Trader's Handbook: Winning Habits and Routines of Successful Traders by Richard Moglen, Nick Schmidt, Ross Haber, and Ameet Rai.  It includes a discussion of "the trader's journey" and details steps in successful trading, from "entry tactics and trade execution" to "sell rules and position management" to "post analysis and trading rules".  

Great trading begins with great mentoring.  There is an amazing set of resources out there.  The first challenge is to establish your curriculum and draw upon the passion and drive of the best traders to find the best within you.

Peak Performance Priorities

 

9/15/2026 - I continue to find that the single greatest mistake that developing traders make is focusing on their mistakes and losses and not clearly identifying and studying what they do right.  As I explain in the Positive Trading Psychology book, this takes a toll on mood and energy level.  Perhaps more significantly, however, it prevents traders from understanding and building upon their strengths.  It is vitally important that developing traders understand what they do well in life and how they can bring those strengths to their trading.  Your trading success will be a leveraging of talents and skills that have already proven successful in some area of life.

When we include in our journals what we've done well and *how* we've done it well, over time we will notice patterns of strengths.  Those become the foundations of our personal best practices.  The best way to overcome negative trading emotions and behaviors, such as fear, greed, and overtrading, is to ground ourselves in what is successful and fulfilling in markets.  

For example, as a psychologist, I found that I was quite good at reading subtle cues during therapy sessions that showed me that my client was going through a change of emotion.  Those emotional shifts within the session almost always occurred when an important topic was touched upon.  Reading my clients alerted me to the issues we needed to work upon.  Later, I found that following moment-to-moment indicators in the stock market, such as shifts in volume and the number of stocks trading on upticks/downticks, similarly alerted me to trend changes in the market.  Reading people, for me, was not so different from reading markets.

Peak performance in markets will occur when we study our peak performance in other areas of life that have made us successful.  What has brought us success to this point will be the foundation for our trading success.

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9/14/2026 - At some point, we don't feel fired up.  The fire in the belly isn't there.  We lose our energy.  And, for most people, that means losing their motivation and falling down on their performance routines.  An athlete cuts corners on the workouts.  A trader glosses over charts without digging deep to see what is going on.  Then performance falls down and energy takes a more serious dive.

Peak performance means engaging in the right processes *whether we feel like it or not*.  That means habit takes over.  We perform at a high level because that's who we are and what we do, not because we're pushing ourselves each step of the way.  

Think of a long-term romantic relationship.  Do we always feel passionately connected to the other person?  No, but we can always act out of love even during those times when we're not feeling madly in love because the connection has become a deep part of us.  What I found after reviewing the Market Wizards series is that great traders are in love with markets and with what they do in markets.  They don't have to be wildly fired up to be deeply connected to price and volume action.  Indeed, many of the Wizards believe that a calm, focused approach is best for decision-making.

Developing traders don't succeed because they tie their motivation to P/L and can't sustain themselves emotionally during inevitable drawdowns.  They never get to the point of letting their love for markets mature, so that they do the right things out of commitment.  When we love the process of trading, we don't need to be emotionally attached to the outcomes.

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9/13/2026 - A reader recently emailed me with a worthwhile question.  He wanted to know how he could determine if a losing trade was due to his poor trading or whether it was due to an anomaly in the market.  In terms of peak performance, it is vital that we understand what goes into success.  The only way we can do that is by reviewing many, many markets over different periods of time and different time periods and observing regularities that accompany trading success.  Only after such an exhaustive review is conducted can we begin to capture those regularities in trading rules that become part of our "playbook".

It is no different for sports teams.  After a basketball game, there is exhaustive review of game film to identify what worked and what didn't.  Players take away lessons about handling situations on offense, on defense, on transitions between offense and defense, etc.  Those lessons are then rehearsed again and again in practice until they sink in and become second nature.

For the professional trader, there has been so much internalization of the rules that a losing trade is often a sign of a changing market.  That enables the trader to quickly pull back risk taking, go into observation mode, and understand the new regime.  Only then can the trader open the playbook for that new market.  For instance, a break from a range may signal a transition from a cyclical to a trending market and will be traded quite differently.

In the past, I've mentioned the skilled trader I worked with who would take a loss, look up at me, and say, "I just paid for information".  Very frequently, the losing trade would alert him to new market conditions and a new set of ideas that could make up for the loss and more. 

Peak performance is not eliminating loss.  It is using loss as a tool for learning and winning.

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9/11/2026 - I recently joined Jeff Holden and the SMB Capital trading education crew to answer the questions of over 200 developing traders.  The group was tackling topics related to trading psychology.  One of the points that I made was that what traders often call "choppy" markets are often cyclical markets that offer shorter-term opportunities to trade the ups and downs.  A major mistake that traders make is wanting to catch the really big (directional) moves/trends.  Often, they end up trading 10 out of every 3 trends, getting whipsawed in the process.  

Following the idea of cycles in the previous post (below), what if we developed tools for identifying when trending markets become more rangebound?  As Jeff pointed out, we could develop new "playbooks" for these range markets with rules that allow us to seize the opportunities present.  This would complement the approaches mentioned in my post on 9/9, which focus specifically on stocks still showing directional potential (stocks "in play").  

The idea, to use Tom Basso's term, is to become an "all-weather trader":  to have ways of making money in different markets and market conditions.  A peak performance mindset is one in which we are flexible enough to recognize that we can succeed under any market conditions.  We don't need to impose our styles on markets; we can adapt to what markets give us.

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9/10/2026 - In The Trader's Handbook, authors Richard Moglen, Nick Schmidt, Ross Haber, and Ameet Rai emphasize "five key principles of trading":  1) Keep it simple; 2) Stay focused; 3) Plan for failure; 4) Manage risk tightly; 5) Think in cycles.  Notice how this advice mirrors that of many of the Market Wizards:  in a very important sense, the successful trader plans for failure and manages risk tightly by knowing where to exit positions.  Peak performance comes from the confidence of knowing your downside and how you can handle it.  That focus is important because how you size and manage risk is just as important as the ideas you generate.

It's the last of the five principles, however, that is underappreciated by most traders.  They think of trends and attempt to capture large directional moves.  The idea of thinking in cycles means that all directional moves have a limited lifespan and that any market will have periods of trending, topping, and bottoming.  Peak performance comes not only from knowing which stocks/asset classes to buy or sell but when in their cycles to do the buying and selling.  "Correctly identifying the current market cycle is one of the most important aspects of trading" (p. 148).  

In the framework developed by William O'Neil, for example (see the post below), the idea is to identify companies with superior growth and focus on when they are in the sweet spots of their cycles and are under accumulation.  Sizing up positions when moving averages are aligned and taking profits when the cycles begin to turn allows for a powerful combination of aggressiveness and defensiveness.  This is a key idea in The Lifecycle Trade book by Eve Boboch and coauthors (see post below).  Every great trade has a lifecycle.

The powerful idea of The Trader's Handbook is that we can make the most of our positions when we study their short and longer-term cycles.  When we trade is just as important as what we trade.    

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9/9/2026 - An important foundation for peak performance is confidence in your trading approach.  The psychology of very successful traders is grounded in a belief that they are capturing enduring opportunity in the market.  In the book Momentum Masters edited by Mark Minervini, David Ryan is asked "How do you know when your strategy may be broken versus just being out of favor with the current market?".  He replies, "My strategy has never been broken.  It is what works in the stock market...Eventually, the market always comes back to where the earnings are growing" (p. 174-5).

*That* is confidence. 

Ryan is a disciple of William O'Neil and his focus on growth stocks that are undergoing accumulation.  Using this approach, he won the U.S. Investing Championship multiple times.  He said that he studied his trades as a beginning trader and got to the point "when I said I am only going to buy this one setup and not care about anything else.  That is when it all started to work" (p. 186).  When strong companies act as strong stocks and the fundamentals line up with the technicals, outstanding moves can be harvested.

I have seen this same approach work for Jim Roppel, whose hedge fund specializes in high performance growth names.  He has strict guidelines for sizing positions up and down based upon performance, and he has strict guidelines for the stocks he considers investing in.  A look through the Roppel Report, his newsletter (which I highly recommend), shows the depth and breadth of his coverage, as well as his ability to detect themes connecting the various stocks covered.  The best stocks in the best themes generate the confidence needed to size positions aggressively when everything lines up. 

In their book The Lifecycle Trade, Eve Boboch, Kathy Donnelly, Eric Krull, and Kurt Daill point out that growth stocks follow a lifecycle pattern.  Traders can achieve excellent performance by knowing where growth stocks are in their lifecycles.  There are different rules for trading different "phases of a stock's lifecycle" (p. 51), allowing for flexibility in the application of trading principles.  

A priority for peak performance is knowing *why* your method works, because that provides confidence that it *will* work.  It is not an accident that the success of William O'Neil has been replicated by the outstanding success of his mentees.  Understanding creates confidence and confidence leads to success.

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9/8/2026 - Market Wizard Tom Basso writes in his book The All-Weather Trader (2023) that "Position sizing is more important than your Buy/Sell engine" (p. 125).  He points out that most traders focus on what and when to buy and sell and put relatively little effort into how much to buy and sell.  He explains that positions evolve as time progresses and a good bet can become a better bet, a worse bet, or even a completely different bet.  Imagine breaking news that leads to a sharp increase in volume traded for a position you're holding.  Volume is highly correlated to volatility and now you're suddenly holding much more risk than you intended.  Similarly, you might see your long position behaving particularly well and breaking above a narrow range after correcting only modestly.  What was a good bet has gotten better and a great trader will size up that position.

Market Wizard Kenny Sharkness, in Market Wizards: The Next Generation (2026) observes something that is true of many of the Wizards:  A large share of their total profits come from a handful of trades.  If we're attentive to position sizing, we can find very good risk/reward points for adding to existing modest positions and turn winning trades into meaningful winners.

Tom Basso adds an addition peak performance idea:  "A successful trader has strategies that help fill the drawdown 'potholes' in the equity curves to make it all less stressful" (p. 142).  In other words, a successful trader identifies periods of drawdown and specifically looks for new trading strategies that can exploit those periods.  By smoothing the P/L curve, we achieve an important goal of trading psychology:  reducing the stress of drawdowns.  

A peak performance mindset is one that can be aggressive in pursuing unusual opportunity while at the same time taking actions that reduce the stress of ups and downs.  Indeed, it is by keeping trading stress manageable that we become able to tap into our reserves and make the most of the few phenomenal opportunities that present themselves in a given time period.  Reducing stress and maximizing opportunity are two sides of peak performance in trading.

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9/7/2026 - In his book One Good Trade, Mike Bellafiore identifies seven "fundamentals" that go into making "one good trade":

*  Proper preparation

*  Hard work

*  Patience

*  A detailed plan before every trade

*  Discipline

*  Communication

*  Replaying important trades

The overarching idea is that a good trade is defined by the process that produced it, not by its P/L.  In this series of posts, I'll take a look at peak performance fundamentals and explain how they are essential to successful trading. 

Mike's text The Playbook brings together these seven fundamentals.  The idea is that the successful trader studies stocks and their movement and eventually identifies promising patterns for buying or selling.  By collecting multiple examples of these patterns, documenting them, and coming up with rules for buying/selling/holding/stopping out, the trader internalizes opportunities and becomes able to recognize them in real time.  Eventually, like a great football or basketball team, the trader has deeply learned so many patterns that they can adapt to almost any market condition.

Peak performance doesn't occur on the basketball court or on the football field unless it has been laid out in advance and rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed.  Staying fully focused on markets requires the ability to sustain effort hour after hour after hour.  Our preparation is our workout routine.  We will never sustain more focus and effort in our trading than we achieve in our preparation.

 

Techniques for Mastering Our Trading Psychology

 

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9/4/2026 - We can learn so much about mastering our trading psychology by studying those who have already achieved such mastery.  Study the masters and you will learn about mastery.

Market Wizard Mark Minervini writes "Those who choose to win seek successful role models, develop a road map for success, and accept setbacks as valuable teachers.  They put a plan into action, learn from their results, and make adjustments until they achieve victory...Champions don't leave greatness to chance.  They decide that they are going to be winners, and they live each day with that goal in focus" (Think and Trade Like a Champion, 2017, p. 3).

Again and again in the accounts of the Market Wizards we encounter the idea that thinking like a champion precedes trading like a champion.  This is much more than eliminating negative thinking; it is living each day in a champion mindset.  In Market Wizards:  The Next Generation by Jack Schwager and George Coyle, Wizard Lance Breitstein described his attitude when joining the trading firm Trillium:  "I wasn't confident that I would succeed, but I was highly confident that I would outwork everyone at that firm.  That was the only thing that I had no doubt about" (p. 42).  Speaking of her training to eventually win a bodybuilding contest, Wizard Linda Raschke explains, "To start, there must be a robust methodology used to build a foundation, and this has to be applied CONSISTENTLY" (Trading Sardines, 2018, p. 197).  

What we learn from studying successful traders is that success is a function of commitment.  Before Olympians become champions, they must be wholly committed to winning their medals--and then bring that commitment to each day's preparation.  Dr. Ari Kiev, in The Mental Strategies of Top Traders (2010), quotes the Scottish Himalayan expedition leader W. H. Murray: "...the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.  All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred...Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.  Boldness has genius, power and magic in it" (p. 29).  

Extraordinary success begins with extraordinary commitment.

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9/3/2026 - In her book Trading Sardines, Market Wizard Linda Raschke points out that "Traders are always looking for the secrets.  Strategies, indicators, algorithms, anything to make money.  Most do not recognize the hard work it takes to do research and development" (p. 304).  During her development "all lessons were learned the hard way" (p. 52).  She succeeded in part because she had learned the discipline to play the piano for hours a day from childhood through adulthood.  Piano mastery required the ability to practice, practice, practice and work on the execution of each chord, each phrase.  That same mastery process--and that intense drive for mastery--is what we see among those who sustain success in markets.  Later in life, Raschke decided to take up bodybuilding and intensively worked on exercise and diet to eventually win a competition.  She had mastered the process of mastery.

Only a vision of success and a passion for self-improvement can sustain the efforts needed for elite performance in the markets.  The most powerful technique for mastering our trading psychology is the ability to tap into a personal vision that so speaks to you that it organizes your life and your efforts.  When every setback is a step forward in learning and mastery, then even losses can give us energy.  Great competitors love to compete, they love to win, but most of all they have a passionate drive for self-improvement.

What do you want to do well?  Really well?  So well, that you're willing to go all in to reach your goals?

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9/2/2026 - Our reactions to markets are a function of our self-talk.  How we process market events determines how we respond to them.  If we process a losing trade by criticizing and blaming ourselves, of course we'll feel like a loser.  If we process a winning trade by puffing ourselves up, of course we'll take too much risk going forward.  If we process a quiet, low-volatility market as boring and a threat to our desire to make money, of course we'll overtrade.

Every practice trading session in which we review/replay markets is an opportunity to rehearse the right kind of self-talk.  For the successful trader, that self-talk is about the market and the patterns showing up in market movement.  Every market tells a story...we look at how markets are moving together or separately and we can detect themes.  Understanding those themes points us to promising trades.  When our self-talk is about those themes, we reinforce a sense of mastery.  

A racecar driver needs to focus on the surrounding cars and the state of his automobile to know when to pass, when to slow down, when to make a pit stop, etc.  If the racecar driver is filled with thoughts and feelings of winning and losing, the distraction will inevitably lead to poor decisions.  How we talk to ourselves shapes how we feel about what we do--and ultimately what we do.

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9/1/2026 - Dr. Ari Kiev, in his book Trading to Win, points out that "When you trade from commitment--and do what you said you would do--you generate an extraordinary amount of energy.  You begin to see opportunities in the market that you couldn't see earlier" (p. 18).  He also explains that "Commitment to a specific objective is the most critical dimension of trading to win since it provides more of the focus and energy than any other single factor" (p. 94).

Notice that Dr. Kiev talks about goals in terms of "commitments".  A goal is not just something we write down and hope for.  It is the north star of all our performance efforts, because it is our "focus".  Having that positive focus allows our commitment to give us energy.  A goal is meaningless if it is not inspiring.

An alcoholic may express the desire and intention to no drink, but when he hits bottom and sees that he *must* change, then his intention becomes a commitment.  In the AA world, such a person may commit to 90 meetings in 90 days, building a community around the commitment and creating a daily focus.  Dr. Kiev points out that goals that are commitments are what inspires and guides Olympic athletes: every workout becomes a step in the realization of an ideal.

Many traders focus on how much money they want to make, how they want to control their emotions, how they want to find the next big move in markets--but they lack an overarching vision of the future.  That vision has to be lived out each day to bring it to reality and to energize our efforts even in the face of a drawdown.  Dr. Kiev teaches that "You create the future by speaking it and then living in terms of what you said...you create yourself by committing to a vision and then becoming the living embodiment of that vision" (p. 247).  

The ideal trading psychology is visionary *and* living that vision each day.

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8/31/2026 - Stress and anxiety are responses to perceived threat.  Our bodies are mobilizing in their "flight or fight" mode to cope with the danger that we sense.  Once we're in that fight or flight mode, blood flow shifts from our frontal cortex (our brain regions of thinking/reasoning) to our motor regions (mobilizing our response to threat).  If it ever seems as though you do things in the heat of the moment that you would normally never do, this is the reason why.  Quite literally, you're not in your right mind!

This is why it's essential to work on our trading in ways that do not trigger perceptions of threat.  If we take risk before we've properly trained ourselves or if we take more risk that we can truly absorb, then we will experience stress and anxiety as normal, natural responses to the perceived danger.  Learning trading and making all our mistakes when we're taking minimal risk--and while we're focused (see yesterday's post)--trains us to maintain our best problem-solving when we most need it.

Once we enter that fight or flight mode, the best thing we can do is pull back from the screens and return our mindsets to their proper focus.  The rule here is to only engage markets when we are able to process information optimally.  A best practice of taking time outs and using that time to calm ourselves with deep, rhythmical breathing--and then returning to markets with modest risk can be cultivated into a habit pattern.  "Above all else, do no harm" is the physician's creed.  The goal is not to trade.  It's to trade when we perceive opportunity--and when we're in a proper mindset to pounce on that opportunity!

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8/30/2026 - Many traders identify emotion as the key enemy to trading success.  Emotion, however, is just one manifestation of a larger trading challenge:  focus.  Successful traders are able to achieve a laser focus on markets--and they are able to sustain that focus throughout their trading.  Building our capacity for focus is one of the most important things we can do to achieve trading success.

When we are fully focused, we see more in markets.  We see more detail, and we see more context.  In an earlier post, I distinguished three facets of focus:  1) intensity of focus; 2) flexibility of focus; and 3) sustainability of focus.  In other words, we want to zoom in on what is important, shift our attention to view the context of what is important, and maintain this process without undue distraction.  Many, many times, emotional disruptions of trading occur when we first lose our concentration.  The emotions are the result of the problem, not the primary problem themselves.

It is better to trade only part of the trading day with full focus than attempt to trade the entire day with distractions.  Indeed, we build our focus muscles when we practice trading and review and replay market action.  As I point out in the Positive Trading Psychology book, we can monitor our heart rate and brain waves in real time to actually see how calm and focused we are.  We can also practice meditative techniques with these same monitors to directly work on achieving and sustaining focus.  Indeed, performing meditation prior to market sessions is a great way to prepare ourselves for the trading day.

Focus is our magnifying glass.  We can turn every trading session and every review into an exercise in sustained concentration.  Our great trading enemy is not emotion.  It is distraction.

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8/28/2026 - We have to lose many times before we internalize the resilience to know that we have what it takes to succeed.  If each loss is a learning lesson that we review in intensive detail and burn into our brains, then we have moved forward in our development even as we step back in our P/L.  It's necessary to bounce back many times before we truly know that nothing can keep us down.  Confidence doesn't come from positive thinking.  It comes from overcoming loss, again and again.

In his book Best Loser Wins, Tom Hougaard points out that "An elite soldier is scared to death the first time he is in a combat situation.  That is why his first combat situation will be a simulation.  And the next one.  And the next one.  And little by little, his fear is trained out of him, through the use of repetition, breathing awareness, and habituation" (p. 37). 

We start by trading in simulation mode or very small.  We lose.  We jump at the opportunity to learn from the loss:  learn how to better enter and exit, how to better identify opportunities.  We lose again.  We again jump at the opportunity.  As we start to win, we get a little bigger.  We lose.  We delve into learning from the losses.  Again and again.  Soon, as Hougaard notes, our fear is trained out of us.  It's not that we're confident that each trade will be a winner.  We're confident that our development will win even when we lose.  We know that our development will win *because* of what we will do when we lose.  Turning losses into learning is perhaps the most important trading psychology technique.  The intensity and repetition of our learning is directly responsible for its impact on our mindset.