The Psychology of Trading: Tools and Techniques for Minding the Markets

The Psychology of Trading will teach you as much about yourself as about trading. It’s Oliver Sacks meets Mr. Market-extraordinary tales of ordinary professionals and individuals with investment disorders, and how they successfully overcame them. It is a must-read both for private investors who have been shell-shocked in the bear market and want to learn how to start again, as well as for pros who seek an extra edge from extra inner knowledge. Steenbarger’s personal voyage into the mind of the market is destined to become a classic.

Author’s Note:

If there is a single theme to this book, it is this: Trading is a microcosm of life. In trading, as in life, we pursue values. In both trading and life, we manage the risks of those pursuits: lost opportunities and realized losses. How we seek values and manage the associated risks will determine our personal and professional success.

Many times, our responses to the uncertainty of outcomes interfere with the achievement of our goals. In careers, romantic relationships, and trading, we find ourselves enacting self-defeating patterns: cutting promising situations short and lingering in unprofitable ones. It doesn’t matter that we are virtuous people, hardworking and otherwise successful. It doesn’t matter that we have attended all the latest seminars, read the hottest books, and purchased all the best trading tools. If our coping with risk distorts our efforts at pursuing values, we will fail to attain the stature that can be ours—as traders and as human beings.

For the past 20 years, I have provided counseling and therapy services to approximately 130 people a year. Almost all of these people have been high-functioning individuals tackling demanding career fields. I learned during these years of practice that the problem patterns of physicians, executives, students, and traders are surprisingly similar. These patterns arise when strategies for emotional risk management—efforts to minimize pain and maximize pleasure—fail to make it possible to successfully navigate life’s matrix of risks and rewards. Every problem pattern we experience is a once-successful coping effort that has outlived its value. Conversely, newly created patterns that meet life’s present challenges lead to success. We are best positioned to achieve our goals when we can extract ourselves from the mindless repetition of the past and fashion fresh life solutions.

The purpose of this book is to help you identify your patterns of success and failure and exercise greater control over these. My deepest hope is that the case studies, the research, and the ideas contained in these pages will provide you with the intellectual and emotional ammunition to face yourself and to transform your approach to life’s risks and rewards.

Contents:

• The Woman Who Could Not Love
• The Student Who Wouldn’t Study
• The Woolworth Man
• Traders Out of Their Minds
• Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary
• The Evil Spiders
• The Big Man beneath the Bed
• Buried Alive!
• Trance-Forming the Mindscape
• The Coat in the Closet
• Pinball Wizardry
• A Session at Gunpoint
• A Dose of Profanity
• Trading from the Couch

The Psychology of Trading: Tools and Techniques for Minding the Markets By Brett N. Steenbarger pdf