In Mastering Trading Stress, author Ari Kiev offers examples, transcripts of conversations, and personality profiles of real-life traders to illustrate how stress affects their ability to perform at their best.
While eliminating stress is neither realistic nor an entirely desired approach, reducing stress is. Traders can perhaps best cope with stress by being proactive and taking steps to reduce the stressfulness of their careers.
In Mastering Trading Stress, I discuss various ways of doing this—beginning with developing an appropriate understanding of stress and how it physically affects us and leading all the way to the implementation of specific exercises that can help traders manage their daily stress.
Because there is no standard answer for every person, a large part of this book includes examples, transcripts of conversations, and personality profiles with other traders. I hope that you will be able to relate to the experiences that these traders are working through. Because stress often leads to carelessness, which leads to failure and therefore more stress, these examples offer insight into how stress directly impacts the trading decisions you make.
They also provide various ways of dealing with or reducing the stress in an effort to trade more effectively. It is my hope that you will directly relate to some of the individuals described throughout this book and will literally be able to learn from their mistakes. In addition, I describe a variety of stress-reducing techniques that you can use. By trying several different techniques, you should be able to generate your own approach to stress management.
There is no way to take the stress out of trading, and if you did you would probably also remove many of the very elements that make this profession so exciting and enticing. But stress does not have to make you emotionally, mentally, or physically ill, and it does not have to hinder your trading game. You can learn to reduce your stress, cope with the stresses that are inevitable, and even use stress to your own benefit.
Contents:
- The Nature of Stress: What Is Stress and Why Is It a Problem?
- The Emotions of Stress: What Negative Emotions Are Experienced as a Result of Stress?
- The Dangers of Trading under Stress: How Do Attempts to Handle Stress Create Problems for the Trader?
- How Fear Inhibits Mastery: Can You Learn to Lessen the Central Emotion of Fear?
- The Consequences of Negative Emotions
- Personalities and Stress
- Ego and Obstinacy
- Fear and Failure
- Perfectionism and Paralysis
- Failing to Manage Risk
- Failure to Dig Deeper
- Failures in Shorting
- Learning to Live with Stress
- Exercises and Practical Applications
