Some good news this week: The Daily Trading Coach is now shipping from Amazon and a contract has already been signed for a Japanese language edition.
The book, unlike my first two, is explicitly structured as a self-help book for traders, focusing on 101 lessons for changing patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior. It also includes ideas for managing a trading business and using Excel to identify historical patterns in markets. My thanks to the many excellent trader/bloggers who contributed their original coaching ideas to the book.
Here is a segment from Lesson 53:
"Suppose someone hijacked your computer as you were trading and suddenly switched the screen from your markets other some other, random ones? Suppose your mouse was taken out of your control and clicked on trades that you didn't want? I guarantee, if that happened to you, you'd become very upset. You would not tolerate someone controlling your computer or your mouse. You would do everything in your power to regain control of your equipment. That has to become your attitude toward the hijacking of your mind [by negative thought patterns]."
Keeping cognitive journals, performing experiential exercises to challenge your self-talk, reframing automatic, negative thought patterns: there are many techniques for shifting how you perceive yourself and your markets.
Are your ways of thinking helping or hindering your performance? Are you actively framing and reframing your views of markets, or are impulses, needs, and fears hijacking the ways in which you think? My goal with the book is to provide tools that enable you to become your own coach and psychologist, so that you are controlling your trading--not the reverse.
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