Enhancing Trader Performance: Proven Strategies From the Cutting Edge of Trading Psychology (Wiley Trading)
Through his own trading experiences and those of individuals he has mentored, Dr. Brett Steenbarger is familiar with the challenges that traders face and the performance and psychological strategies that can meet those challenges. In Enhancing Trader Performance, Steenbarger shows you how to transform talent into trading skill through a structured process of expertise development and reveals how this approach can help you achieve market mastery.
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Entertaining but long winded,
If you read the bullet points above, you have a good idea of what this book covers. Note that you must take these bullets LITERALLY! Where it says discusses, explores, and introduces … don’t expect anything more.
My grouse with this tome is that I have almost finished it and still have not learned how to coach myself “with practical cognitive and behavioral techniques that rapidly change problem patterns and build new, positive ways of thinking and behaving”.
If time is money, then the value of this book goes down because it is unnecessarily long winded. As such I can only give this 3 stars.
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|For professional trading trainers and trainees,
I gave a high rating to the author’s first book “Psychology of Trading” with a review title “Well researched and written, but not for the mass” in that it suits perfectly those with medium or above knowledge of psychology. It’s hardly a coincidence, that the second book of the author is also targeted at the professionals, or, to be specific, professional traders who can enjoy systemized training/mentoring offered by their institutions. For traders like me who dont have such priviledges, nearly half of it became quite irrelevant and remote. Definitely worth a read, especially the part elaborating the linkage between practice and expertise, but not as useful nor insightful as fans of his first book might expect.
p.s. Below please find some of my favorite passages for your reference.
Competence precedes confidence: Winning mindsets result from mastery, not the reverse pg 4
When you have found your niche, you dont need discipline to do the right things; you wont want to do anything else. pg 29
Markets, like people, have their personalities; our relationships with markets will profit to the extent that there is compatibility. pg 35
Evolution occurs when we are so taxed that we must make fresh adaptive efforts. The expert is one who continually adapts to extraordinary performance demands. pg 119
How to trade and what to trade are subordinate to when to trade. pg151
Amateur traders turn into professional traders once they stop looking for the next great technical indicator and start controlling their risk on each trade. – John Carter pg 156
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|Don’t just read it. Absorb it.,
First, to keep things totally above board, let me state for the record that Brett Steenbarger wrote the forward to my book, The Essentials of Trading. He and I became aquainted through my editorial work with Trade2Win. When my book was near completion, I asked Brett to give it a look knowing that he was involved in trader training and development. The forword followed from that.
Brett’s new book, Enhancing Trader Performance, is his second, following on the heels of his extremely successful and worthwhile initial release, The Psychology of Trading. I would not, though, call it a sequel. While the latter part of the new work does bring in major elements of what the first book covered, the majority of it has a quite different focus
Enhancing Trader Performance is primarily about developing trading expertise. As someone who has spent his fair share of time teaching and coaching on a variety of levels and in different theaters of pursuit, some of which were extremely competitive and performance oriented, I was immediately grabbed by Brett’s presentation. And it never let me go – literally pages of notes later.
This book may not be for everyone. It clearly has a bias which leans more toward the full-time and/or short-term trader than someone who traders longer-term and/or on a more part-time basis. This is a natural function of Brett’s work helping professional traders with their development and to overcome performance hurdles, along with his own personal efforts in the market, which are short-term in nature as well.
That said, there is still a ton of extremely useful material for any trader, new or experienced. Enhancing Trader Performance provides a sort of roadmap toward developing trading expertise. This isn’t about the mental part of actually making trades and managing positions. Rather it is more a discussion of how one becomes more than just a competent trader.
Coaching is a major theme, with Brett clearly being a proponent of traders having coaches who can assist them in their development similar to the way they would an athlete. I personally tend to disagree with the way he uses “coach” and “mentor” interchangably as I consider the two to be different, but that does not detract from the overall message. Importantly, since it can be difficult for the individual trader to get in to a good coaching relationship, Brett shares plenty of tips and advice for how a trader can be their own coach.
The one major carryover from The Psychology of Trading is the use of the stories of actual people – either real or composite. They really help to drive home the points Brett is making, and in a fashion easily relatable by the reader.
In short, read this book if it is at all your objective to excel at trading. More than that, take your time and really absorb it. Read it once, then read it again. I know I will.
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