Sunday, March 17, 2024

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:


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




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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How to Change Your Psychology

 

We internalize what we do consistently.

If we consistently avoid effort, we will internalize lack of initiative.  If we consistently reach out to others with love, we will internalize warmth and caring.  Change begins with doing.  Simply shifting goals or mindsets will not produce lasting change.

Notice how athletes work out in structured routines.  Surgeons learn their craft by following evidence-based procedures and following these faithfully.  Performing artists master their craft through feedback and repetition.  When practice and performance are process-based, something important happens psychologically:  We internalize a sense of discipline and self-control.  Consistency of preparation and practice creates consistency of performance.

To change ourselves psychologically, we can start with just one improvement we wish to make and create a routine for implementing that shift every single day.  If I want to internalize a sense of physical fitness, I can go to the gym daily and challenge my limits in terms of flexibility, aerobics, and strength.  If I want to internalize discipline in my trading, I can use backtests and performance reviews to create rules for when to take trades, where to enter/exit, etc.  Following rules each day leads me to internalize a sense of control.  Pushing my limits each day reinforces a sense of growth and achievement.

Choose one goal and do one thing to achieve that goal daily for a month.  Then take on a second goal for a month, etc. and add that to the first.  Then a third goal, a fourth--and soon you internalize a sense of progress, achievement, and self-control.

We don't change by thinking new things.  We do new things and shift how we think and feel.  

What one thing will you do consistently this week to be your best version of yourself?

Further Reading:

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Thursday, March 14, 2024

Trading Psychology Links: Developing Yourself by Developing Your Self

 
*  Every trade plan is an opportunity to work on our psychology, training us to act on opportunity and not react to fear; 

Lance Breitstein does a great job of explaining why success in trading requires investment in ourselves;

*  Such a valuable point from Adam Fiske:  What indicators/signals do you track regularly to tell you *not* to trade?

*  Jeff Holden from SMB Capital observes that we need to work on proper bet sizing--and understand the relative degrees of edge we have in trades--before we start betting big;

Have a great finish to the week!

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Sunday, March 10, 2024

How to Deal With the Fear of Not Being Right

 
It's one of the great paradoxes of psychology that when we run from something we fear, we are most likely to encounter it.  The important principle here is that we internalize what we do.  When we act on a particular premise, we reinforce that premise in our minds.  Thus, when we run from a feared outcome, we end up reinforcing that fear.

An experienced trader recently reached out to me regarding the fear of not being right when in a trade.  Psychologically, that means we're taking being wrong as a threat.  The threat of being wrong can become so strong in our minds that we take off the position before it has a chance to be right!

Every trade plan is an opportunity to work on our psychology.  When we set a stop loss for a position, we want to use that stop to intensively mentally rehearse what we want to be doing if the order is triggered.  Very often, we can get stopped out of a trade, but nothing happens to invalidate the idea behind the trade.  For example, I might get long a stock on an earnings beat in the premarket.  The stock stalls out and begins to retrace some of its initial gain.  I become so afraid of not being right that I take the position off--only to see the stock roar higher at the NYSE open when large volume hits the tape.  

If I have set a stop on the trade, however, I can--at that time-- mentally rehearse the conditions that would get me back into the position.  Just because a premarket flow took me out of an initial position doesn't mean that the fundamental strength of the company won't support a higher share price.  

So, so often the trade doesn't work out, but the idea--and the work we have put into generating the idea--is still valid.  We lose sight of the good work that goes into a trade when we focus on the fear of not being right.  What makes the trade not right is not the same as what makes the trade idea not right.  It's when we can embrace the possibility of any trade being wrong that we open ourselves up to re-entering positions and profiting from being right.

Further Reading:

How FOMO Can Actually Help Your Trading

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Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Trading Psychology Links: Finding Our Optimal Performance Mindset

 

The right mindset won't substitute for a rigorously developed edge in the markets, but the wrong one can certainly undo all our training and experience.  Here are some valuable trading psychology perspectives that can help you make the most out of your experience:

*  It's not enough to control our emotions and stick to time-tested processes.  We have to actively develop a positive mindset if we're going to maximize our creativity, productivity, and performance.

Akil Stokes offers a diverse trading psychology podcast for developing traders.


*  Here are two valuable books on trading psychology:  The Mental Game of Trading by Jared Tendler and Mastering the Mental Game of Trading by Steven Goldstein.

*  This is the focus needed for successful trading.  If we need to make money, markets control us.

Have  a great finish to the week! - Brett

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Mastering the Positive Psychology of Trading

 
Working on mastering the psychology of trading is different for beginning/developing traders and for experienced traders.  I have worked with rookies at proprietary trading firms, and I have worked with experienced money managers who guide large teams.  The psychological challenges faced by the two groups are entirely different.  What you need to do to master your trading psychology very much depends upon where you are at in your learning curve.

Here is an analogy that might clarify things.  Freud's revolutionary contribution to psychology can be found in his dictum, "Where id was, there ego shall be".  The id represents our basic, primal instincts: our flight and fight tendencies.  When we are triggered by past, unresolved conflicts, we tend to regress to our instinctual mode.  The purpose of psychotherapy is to help a person process their issues and feelings in the medium of a helping relationship.  This enables them to gain perspective on what is truly a threat in the present versus a leftover response from our past.  The heart of Freud's therapy is that we first confront and resolve our conflicts in the here and now context of the helping relationship.  Once we can begin to constructively handle our issues within therapy, we're ready to tackle them in our day to day lives.  Therapy thus replaces the id with the ego:  we replace our flight/fight triggers with rational thought and planning.

The field that has come to be known as positive psychology takes Freud's work to a new direction.  Instead of working on resolving past conflicts and painful repressed experiences, positive psychology has us identifying and building our unique, distinctive strengths.  For example, I might experience a loss of motivation at work and my performance might suffer.  A traditional therapist might have me explore conflicts about my work and with my colleagues.  Resolving hidden problems in the workplace could help me regain my motivation.  The therapist addressing my situation from the perspective of positive psychology might help me understand the positives that I need in my life and that might be missing on the job.  For example, if one of my basic strengths is intellectual curiosity, I might need to address my situation by changing how I interact with my team at work--or perhaps I need to find different work.

So now we can appreciate the difference in psychology between beginning and advanced traders.  Beginning traders, unaccustomed to ever-changing, volatile markets, find themselves coping with their flight/fight stress responses and the ways in which those color trading decisions.  Experienced traders, on the other hand, find that their greatest challenges occur when they do not adequately cultivate and utilize their strengths.  For example, where the rookie might respond to volatile action in a stock with decisions based on FOMO, the experienced trader might be challenged by finding the best risk/reward expressions of their trade ideas.  

For the experienced trader, a key to trading success is knowing what speaks to you and what you're truly good at.  You cannot play to your strengths if you aren't intimately familiar with what those strengths are.  Working on correcting weaknesses only gets you so far.  Eventually, if you're going to progress from competency to expertise, you need to master your own positive psychology.  

An obstacle I've faced in my own trading is that I simply become bored with following markets and I stop trading.  Creativity and learning are my two greatest strengths, and I lose motivation when I'm not discovering and doing new things.  The common wisdom of trading psychologists is to turn everything you do into reliable, repeatable processes.  That is precisely what bores me.  If trading begins to feel like an assembly line, I start to feel trapped in a rote, routine job.  To keep trading fresh and exciting, I need to do the same thing that I do in my marriage and in my personal life:  find new challenges and new opportunities and always, always devote some portion of my time to innovation.  

I recently wrote on the topic of finding different sources of trading edge.  I also wrote on the topic of developing resilience as a trader.  The two topics are intimately connected--for me, and for many people I work with.  What keeps us going during the inevitable drawdowns is that we're continually learning, continually discovering, continually moving forward.  Doing new things keeps us psychologically fresh.

Earlier today, I began analyzing a new dataset.  I looked at market breadth broken down sector by sector.  Interestingly, over the last few years, when breadth strength in the consumer staples (XLP) sector has greatly exceeded breadth strength among the consumer discretionary stocks (XLY), the next 10 to 20-day returns in the overall market (SPY) have been significantly above average.  This finding has set off a flurry of queries into various sector rotations and how those might act as meaningful measures of market sentiment.  New data, new patterns, new trading opportunities, new motivation and drive, new games to play and win.

We master the positive psychology of trading by drawing consistently upon our own positives and expanding those.  I believe this is the single greatest frontier in the field of trading psychology.  More to come!

Further Reading:

Should High Achieving Traders Seek a Balanced Life?

Therapies for the Mentally Well:  Proven Techniques for Building Your Positive Psychology

Radical Renewal:  Tools for Leading a Meaningful Life

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Wednesday, February 28, 2024

Trading Psychology Links: Sustaining a Resilient Mindset

 
Resilience is not the absence of stress, but rather the ability to channel stress toward greater performance.  Here are some worthwhile perspectives on resilience in trading:

*  How we learn trading can also be how we learn resilience;

*  Here's an excellent thread from Dr. Steven Goldstein re: how resilience comes from aligning our trading with our personalities;

*  Lance Breitstein passes along nuggets of wisdom from James Clear, emphasizing the importance of peace of mind and inner satisfaction toward resilience and performance.  Here's a great thread from James Clear that captures the importance of persistence;

*  I find that researching edges in markets leads to greater confidence in trade ideas, which leads to greater resilience during the trade.  Here's a nice example of research from Concretum Research;

Insightful thread from Richard Moglen on how top traders focus their efforts;

*  Mike Bellafiore from SMB Capital teaches developing traders to recognize patterns in the market and build "playbooks" for trading these--great way to build resilience through intensive training;

This TraderFeed post has some worthwhile links to different facets of resilience.

We learn to be resilient by learning from resilient performers--

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Sunday, February 25, 2024

How to Overcome Performance Pressure

 
I'm hearing from more traders than usual about their struggles with performance anxiety.  As one successful developing trader put it, the problem tends to happen "on high profile trades that you could say most traders have an eye on".  This is a very good observation.  The higher profile the trade--i.e., the greater the perceived opportunity--the more room there is for performance pressure.  As Epictetus observes, the issue is not the "real problems" about the trades, but rather the "anxieties" about those trades.

Let's look at this from a psychological angle.  The more we perceive--and emphasize--opportunity in a situation, the more room we create for anxiety should we miss out on this opportunity.

Imagine shooting a free throw during a basketball practice.  It's routine, you've done it hundreds and hundreds of times, and you feel no pressure.  Now imagine the situation from my old college team.  You've had a long practice after classes and you're dead tired and want to get home.  The coach announces that players can go take a shower, change, and go home after they have made 10 consecutive free throws.  Now, all of a sudden, there is pressure.  You *really* want to go home, so once you've made six foul shots in a row, you worry that you might miss one and have to return to square one.  Coach, of course, knew that.  This was not simply a practice of free throw shooting, but a practice of performing under pressure.

Now imagine that it's an actual game and the second-half clock is winding down with your team down a point.  You have just been fouled, and you get to shoot a one-and-one.  If you miss the first shot, the odds are good that the opposing team will grab the rebound and run out the clock for the win.  If you make the first shot, you get a second shot that could win the game for your team.  Everything is on the line.  Suddenly, what had been routine in practice feels anything but routine.

This is what is happening for the trader who experiences performance pressure.  It occurs in a "high profile" situation in a volatile market, where the trade could either do very well or very poorly.  Moreover, it's a situation that other traders on the floor are focused on.  Everyone will see if you nail it or mess it up.  If this were an ordinary trade in simulation mode, there would be no pressure and it would be relatively easy to execute.  With more on the line--financially and psychologically--we start to overthink the trade.  That gets us away from what we know how to do naturally.

Very often, performance pressure manifests itself as perfectionism.  We feel that everything is on the line, so we try to do everything perfectly.  The perfect becomes the enemy of the good, as it gets us away from doing what we know how to do naturally.  Like most players, I had a routine for shooting a free throw.  Hold the ball in both hands, look at the rim, bounce the ball three times, look at the rim again, bounce twice, look at the rim, exhale, focus, and shoot.  Same way, every time.  But if I am in a pressured situation, I alter the routine.  I don't exhale.  I aim the ball.  I become self-conscious of my release.  Clang.  The shot bounces off the front rim.

So it is with trading.  We over-focus on the entry, wanting the perfect risk-reward.  Suddenly the market moves in the anticipated way before we get in.  We don't want to chase it, so we hope for a pullback, but it keeps going.  We missed the trade.  Clang.

What my coach realized is that you can't learn to perform under pressure unless you practice under pressure.  That is why military and SWAT teams practice maneuvers under realistic conditions with live fire.  That is why EMT personnel practice rescue methods under observation while being timed.  Practice under pressure turns pressure into routine.  That is how actresses and actors overcome stage fright.  Going on stage again and again in dress rehearsals prepares them for the live performance.

As traders, we can create dress rehearsals in imagery--vividly imagining pressured situations and visualizing in detail how we want to respond.  Again and again, we walk ourselves through pressured situations and the repetition makes the pressure familiar.  We can't be stressed out by something we're very familiar with.  We can also create our own dress rehearsals by trading challenging situations in simulation mode and making ourselves accountable for the outcomes.  Imagine, for example, working in simulation mode and not being allowed to trade live for the next session unless the simulated trades were executed well.  

We learn to perform under pressure by building pressure into our practice.  No psychological self-help methods will work if we're not making use of them in the actual heat of battle.  If our practice is comfortable, we set ourselves up for performance anxiety when the game becomes uncomfortable.

Further Reading:

Performance Anxiety:  The Most Common Problem Traders Face

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Sunday, February 18, 2024

Where Does Trading Edge Come From?

 


It's been interesting returning from my sabbatical and rejoining the online world of trading.  So much noise, so much noise, and yet there are gems out there.  Kudos to the sharing of original research from Concretum Research.  It is a joy to find social media posts that share ideas and address our highest aspirations to understand and master complex realities.

There is an important relationship between trading edge and trading psychology.  Let's explore.

Consider three sources of trading edge:

1)  Directional Movement - We find patterns and relationships in markets that lead to the directional trading of an asset.  An example would be a breakout move that results from a news catalyst.

2)  Relative Movement - We find patterns and relationships in the movement of one asset relative to another one.  An example would be the relative value trading of rates, where we might expect the yield curve to steepen due to inflationary pressures in the economy.

3)  Absolute Movement - We find patterns and relationships in the volatility of assets.  An example would be an options trade that makes money if markets stay in a relatively quiet range after a volatile period accompanied by high options skew.

A rough analogy would be the different ways of scoring of a basketball team.  Against a man-to-man defense, there may be opportunities to drive the lanes and exploit the inside game.  Against a two-three zone defense, there may be opportunities to move the ball on the perimeter and utilize cross-court passes for the outside game.  Against a slower defense, there may be opportunities for long passes and fast breaks for layups.  The point is that no successful team has a single way to win.  They understand the environment in which they're operating and then run the plays that exploit that particular situation.

So it is in trading.  There are times when markets are rotational and relative movement can be exploited.  There are trending periods that call for directional trading.  There are also noisy and quiet periods that lend themselves to edges in volatility space.  A great number of trading opportunities occur when environments change and participants are caught playing the old game rather than changing their offensive alignments.

Great traders, like great sports teams, have multiple ways of winning under varying conditions and circumstances.  When traders lack adaptability and trade limited sources of edge, they find that what worked in one period of time suddenly does not work now.  That leads to frustration, and that can lead to subsequent poor trading.

The problem, however, is *not* primarily one of trading psychology.  The disruption of psychology is the result of the problem, not the primary cause.  It is the limited, inflexible trading edge that makes us vulnerable to changing markets and variable performance.  Expanding what Mike Bellafiore calls our playbooks--our sources of edge in different market conditions--is one of the most powerful ways in which we can fortify our trading mindset.

Further Reading:

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Thursday, December 28, 2023

Three Best Practices of Successful Traders

 


With this post, I'll be taking an extended sabbatical in order to complete my next book and related projects.  I thought a worthy final post would summarize the best practices of traders who have experienced success in 2023, with the aim of improving yourself and your trading processes in 2024.


Best Practice #1:  Moving From Reactive Trading to Planned Trading

Very often, the psychological challenges that traders face occur because they are making trading decisions in the heat of the moment, when they are most likely to be stressed and impulsive.  Successful traders have intensively studied their most successful trading and know what they do best.  They then turn their best practices into trading rules, so that they know exactly what kinds of opportunities to look for in markets, how to express those opportunities, how to size the positions and manage them, etc.  The beauty of knowing what you do best and how you do it is that you can then mentally rehearse the right actions as part of preparation for the day.  Biofeedback and visualization methods can be helpful in that mental rehearsal.  Keeping the right kind of trading journal also helps greatly in focusing on your learning lessons.  Knowing your best trading also enables you to stand apart from markets when opportunity isn't present.  The best traders I work with patiently wait for their opportunity and don't feel a need to trade.  They are like the baseball batter who knows the pitcher well and is willing to wait for a good pitch in the strike zone.

Best Practice #2:  Drawing Upon Your Strengths     

Here is a short personality quiz designed to identify your strengths.  Here is a way of interpreting the results.  The successful traders I've worked with know who they are, what they're good at, and what excites and challenges them.  They also are aware of their flaws and can leverage those into strengths.  Because they find ways of trading that leverage their strengths and are meaningful to them, they have no problem staying engaged in markets during challenging times.  They also draw upon their strengths outside of their involvement in markets, so that their personal activities are an ongoing source of fulfillment.  The right work-life balance isn't just spending time in activities outside of trading; it's making use of the best of you in relationships and in personal pursuits.  The number one occupational hazard for full-time traders is burnout.  When we don't achieve work-life balance based on what is meaningful to us, we lose work efficiency and we become less creative.  I've often advised traders to always make sure they have passions in life that are greater than their passion for trading.  If your only strength is trading, that becomes a vulnerability.

Best Practice #3: Creativity   

The greatest weakness of traders overall is that they are looking at the same markets, processing the same information, and trading from the same charts and ideas as others.  There is very little original in their thinking or trading.  They are like the business owner who sets up a shop to compete with surrounding businesses, but who copies what they do.  If you don't do different and distinctive things in markets, you won't achieve different and distinctive results.  This is a topic I address in the Trading Psychology 2.0 book and that I've also tackled in the blog here and here.  As the book emphasizes, there are specific techniques and processes we can learn to become better and more differentiated idea generators.  The key is to look at new information and integrate information in new ways.  Teamwork--networking with others who have backgrounds and skills different from us--is a valuable practice that can help us expand our horizons.  In my own trading, I have found the best results by focusing on data that others don't look at, from high-frequency measures of buying and selling to patterns of breadth across time frames among equity sectors.    

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I hope this helps you coach yourself to greater success.  As further resources, please check out this series of articles on trading psychology techniques (links to all articles at the bottom of the post); this post on best practices; and this post on learning from our best trades.  If there is a specific trading psychology topic you are interested in, there's a good likelihood you can find something by doing a search for "TraderFeed topic".  So, for instance, a search for "TraderFeed trading discipline" yields relevant posts.  If you are interested in a collection of self-help techniques for your trading psychology, The Daily Trading Coach book might be most helpful.  Best of luck for a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2024!  

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Sunday, December 17, 2023

Can This Market Rally Continue?

 
The U.S. stock market has rallied sharply off its late October lows, bringing us to fresh highs in several large cap indexes.  On Thursday we saw particular breadth strength with over 2500 stocks across the major indexes registering fresh monthly highs and over 1700 making new three-month highs.  At the same time, only 188 and 86 stocks hit new one- and three-month lows.  Thanks to the dovish shift by the Federal Reserve and a dramatic turn lower in interest rates, the buying was broad, lifting both small and large cap shares.  When we see large moves across asset classes--fixed income, currencies, equities--we know that something fundamental is afoot among macro investors.  But what comes next?  After such broad strength, do we see further upside momentum or reversal?  Let's take a look at recent market history.

As I have indicated in the past, strength (as measured by the number of shares making fresh new highs) and weakness (as measured by new lows) need to be considered as relatively independent variables.  To be sure, the two are related--since 2016 (almost 2000 market days), the correlation between 1 month new highs and lows is -.54 and between 3 month new highs and lows is -.46.  What this means is that only about 25% of the variance in new lows is accounted for by the number of new highs and vice versa.  (All data from Barchart.com).

When we examine the historical data since 2016, we can see the importance of considering strength and weakness separately.  For instance, we've only had 24 days in that time where three-month new highs exceeded 1000.  Over the next 10 trading sessions, SPY averaged a loss of -.11%, compared with  +.23% for the remainder of the sample.  Over the next 50 trading sessions, however, SPY gained an average of +3.81%, well more than the average gain of +2.39% for the remainder of the sample.  Indeed, when we have had an explosion of new highs, the market was up 21 times, down only 3 over the next 50 days.  Over the next 10 days, it was up 11 times, down 13.

Conversely, when three-month new lows are below 100 (N = 475), returns have been superior over the next 20 trading sessions, averaging a gain of +1.99% vs. an average gain of +.59% for the remainder of the sample.  In other words, when new highs are high, we have seen momentum over a longer time horizon; when new lows have been low, we see shorter-term upside momentum.  When new highs are high *and* new lows are low, the pattern has been similar to that for elevated new highs:  weak returns over the next ten trading sessions; superior returns over a 50-day horizon.

No doubt, forward news on inflation and growth will impact rates markets and that, in turn, could move stocks.  During rising trending/momentum markets, I have found it to be helpful to look for short-term oversold points in the market (points during which the majority of stocks close below their 3 and/or 5 day moving averages) that occur at higher price lows.  Those dips are opportunities to participate in the broader trend and also create logical spots to stop out if the uptrend is broken.  At least for now, markets are treating the Fed news as a game changer.  Recent historical evidence suggests that the rising tide lifting all boats often continues, though not necessarily in the short run.

Further Reading:

Using Emotion to Change Emotion

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