Enhancing Trader Performance: Proven Strategies From the Cutting Edge of Trading Psychology

Enhancing Trader Performance forged from storms and tempests. Roughly one year after the publication of The Psychology of Trading, Steenbarger left the protected world of academic medicine to tackle the rough-and-tumble world of proprietary trading in Chicago.

Author’s Introduction:

As I write this, many traders are coming home empty-handed. The old ways of trading—sticking with the well-populated stock indexes and trading patterns of momentum and trend—are no longer working. I recently wrote an article for the Trading Markets web site in which I tracked the proportion of two-day trending periods in the S&P 500 Index over the past 40 years. The resulting graph sloped steadily downward. Many individual stocks, however—particularly those not typically included in the baskets of stocks employed in program trading and arbitrage—showed an upward slope, as did selected alternative trading vehicles. Futur  performance is likely to require increasing degrees of creativity in matching trading styles and markets.

My personal research and trading have shifted in that direction, and I invite you to join me in the quest for alpha by staying in touch through the web sites. I hope that this book will not only assist individual traders, but also help to speed developments within the trading industry. Until now, much of trading education has consisted of the provision of content: seminars, articles, and information. Increasingly, I believe we’ll see a shift toward ongoing training and the professionalization of trading as a discipline.

We are already seeing the start of such a development in the software field. Just a few years ago, we had separate applications for market analytics, charting, screening, and order execution. Now we are seeing vendors roll all of these features into single, integrated applications that streamline the process from trade idea development through trade management. I recently sipped coffee at a Chicago Starbucks with Joe Kohnen of CQG, Inc., and reviewed the path his company had taken: depth of market, charting, analytics, and order execution now exist on a single page, with order entry as simple as releasing the mouse on the bar of a chart. Rapidly, these performance efficiencies are becoming the norm for all electronic traders.

Contents:

• Where Expertise Begins
• Finding Your Performance Niche as a Trader
• Building Competence
• Strategies for Cultivating Competence
• From Competence to Expertise
• Mechanics, Tactics, Strategies
• Performance Dynamics
• Cognitive Techniques for Enhancing Performance
• Behavioral Techniques for Enhancing Performance

Enhancing Trader Performance: Proven Strategies From the Cutting Edge of Trading Psychology By Brett N. Steenbarger pdf