Trading with Head and Heart: Balancing Strategy and Psychology
I received an email from a reader named Doug, about my recent blog post: “…I'm definitely a skeptic with the psychology portion of trading - but as a futures day-trader,…
Getting What You Want: How Your Deepest Desires Shape Trading Outcomes
Financial markets are vast, and the ways we can interact with them are almost limitless. However, a few things are clear: there are far more losers than winners in the…
Why Yelling at Your Trades Won’t Work: Lessons from Competitive Farming”
“Okay, so think about it like this, what if you were a competitive farmer?” It was an early Saturday and I was working with a trader (let’s call him Sam) in…
Being Right Being Wrong
There are about ten thousand ways a trade idea can go wrong. You don’t have to trade very long to seemingly encounter most of them in your first handful of…
Life hacks and learning to trade
One of the interesting developments of the past ten years is the gradual death of the “life hack” approach. This is a good thing. The reason this movement has died…
Trading Lessons from Knife Sharpening
A few nights ago I decided to sharpen my knives. As many of my readers know, I spent some time in a professional kitchen, and there was a time when…
Thinking about Thinking: Probability and Psychology in the Markets
This is a followup to my recent blog post on strings of losses in trading systems. I ended that blog with a promise to consider how the probabilities affected our…
Finding flow in trading and in life
Have you ever been so completely engrossed in an activity that you become lost in it? Maybe you had no sense of time and hours seemed like minutes—you forgot what…
Five steps to being fully present in the moment
What you think you see is not what you see. What you think is happening is not what is happening. Everything we experience is filtered through our inner dialog and…
Writing prompts: Trading psychology and risk management
Continuing from my last post, here are the rest of the questions my friend asked me to expound upon. What is Risk Management and should it be lumped together under…
Wins live in the land of loss
I'm sitting here at my desk looking out the window. On my desk is a (perfectly normal and fair) coin that I had been flipping a while. Question: can you…
Are beliefs all that matter? Thoughts on trading psychology
Here's an interesting question on a controversial topic--trading psychology. Reader Rob sent me a note asking: Hi. I hope you can help me with a question. I am a developing…
Four steps to mastering your fear of trading
Every trader faces fear, sooner or later. In a perfect world, we'd be fearful at exactly the right times and use that fear to manage our risk, but we all…
We Have Met the Enemy…
It is a simple choice: continue to be angry at the way the market moves, or align with it