Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude
Douglas uncovers the underlying reasons for lack of consistency and
helps traders overcome the ingrained mental habits that cost them
money. He takes on the myths of the market and exposes them one by one
teaching traders to look beyond random outcomes, to understand the true
realities of risk, and to be comfortable with the “probabilities” of
market movement that governs all market speculation.Douglas uncovers the underlying reasons for lack of consistency and
help
List Price: $ 50.00
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Trading to Win: The Psychology of Mastering the Markets (Wiley Trading)
A breakthrough programfor achieving new heights of trading success
The product of a five-year collaboration between Dr. Ari Kiev, a leading psychiatrist renowned for his success with Olympic athletes, and top equities trader Steve Cohen, Trading to Win gives you the essential tools to overcome outmoded, self-limiting beliefs and mindsets that may be keeping you from a higher level of success. Illustrated with real market scenarios and applications, this powerful program will help psych yo
List Price: $ 70.00
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Picks up where every other book leaves off,
If you are like most people, after your first few losing trades you set about to learn better market analysis. After your next string of losers you learned about risk management. But there’s still one more challenge to conquer; yourself.
That is the major premise of this book. If it sounds like wishy-washy psycho-babble to you, I’ll only say that I would have agreed — four months ago, before I quit my 20-year technology career, obtained a Series/7 license and joined a professional day-trading firm. I now believe most people would lose money if you gave them 50/50 odds on whether or not it was going to rain tomorrow.
In other words, successfully forecasting the market is not enough. Why not? Well, this book explains why not. It has to do with one’s sense of self-worth, one’s moral judgment of money, one’s work-ethic, one’s tendency to focus on good news while ignoring bad, and other things.
“Zone” was recommended to a friend of mine by a professional floor trader who told him, “I wish I had read it before starting two years ago. Don’t place another trade until you do.” Well said. Does this apply to investors as well as traders? Oh, absolutely! If you have ever said to yourself, “I’m not selling that stock while it’s down, I’ll wait until I have a profit in it,” then for the love of money, read this book.
Finally, read “Zone” before Douglas’ earlier work. If you still want more then read “Disciplined Trader” for a general review plus a deeper exploration into the author’s philosophical and meta-physical theories.
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|Set up your mind before trading,
If you want to fulfill your expectations of a perfect trading system this is not your book. This book is about you and the market; is about how to set up your mind to become a consistent winner.
Chapter 1 describes the necessary mental framework for trading properly.
Chapter 2 shows the psychological challenges a trader must face up to.
Chapters 3 to 5 define the mental framework for trading and what will happen if you lack it.
Chapters 6 and 7 tell us how to get that mental framework from a personal point of view ( opportunity flow and thinking in probabilities).
Chapters 8 to 10 describe how to achieve that mental framework from the market’s point of view.
Chapter 11 is an exercise to put it all together.
Although Mr. Douglas knows what he’s talking about, his book requires more market examples. Furthermore he loses the thread of his arguments at times and request to be reviewed several times to make the most of it.
In spite of this shortcomings it is correct a approach and worth reading.
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|3 stars, should have been 5,
Because the core of the book – the emphasis on ‘thinking probabilistically’, and on banishing both fear and euphoria: on the system rather than on individual trades – is excellent and worth the cover price alone.
However there is a wearying amount of padding – most of it in the ‘obviousness’ category. The author spends pages at a time, for example, telling us that:
1. We have beliefs
2. Those beliefs cause us to act certain ways
3. We can change those beliefs
4. Therefore causing us to act in different ways.
(etc etc etc)
We knew all this.
Chief problem is that Douglas isn’t a writer: doesn’t know how to pare and refine material; reduce to essence; delete the unnecessary. Likes the sound of his own voice.
This also shows in the frequent spelling and grammatical mistakes, and the poor punctuation – which tends to throw one’s attention all over the page, trying to discern a meaning. I’d have hoped the publisher – Prentice Hall – could have afforded an editor.
Douglas also affects, at times, knowledge of things he knows nothing about. E.g. equating negative ions with negative emotions – i.e. an electrical charge with a metaphor (!) Even a bit of school science would have prevented this one.
Hard to know whether to recommend this book or not, as reading it will waste much of your time: as you proceed from gem to gem (and there are many) via a wilderness of excess, often meaningless, verbiage.
Advice to wealthy readers: Pay someone to rip out the time-wasting pages, and chapters, and salvage for you the worthwhile bits – most of them in the first half.
Advice to Prentice Hall: Employ editors; you’ll find it cost-effective in the long run. For example, people will recommend more of your books to other people.
Advice to Mark Douglas: cut this book in half, or less.
John Macgregor
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|Don’t start trading without it.,
I have two copies of Trading to Win; one I lend to my traders, and one I keep for myself.
I have been involved in running a professional trading firm for the past three years. At first, there were only a handful of books to help an individual transition from active investing, to trading. These days, it seems, there is a new title introduced every few days. I look at the majority of these books, and few are worth reading from cover to cover.
Trading to Win is an exception. This book deals with the psychology of trading in a more thorough way than any book I’ve read. As insightful as Elder’s Trading for a Living, with more detail on the psychology of winning, and a more updated perspective. Ari Kiev takes his readers through a step-by-step process, showing them how to build their personal psychologies and become “master traders”. He compares trader training to the training of Olympic athletes in a way that is accurate and interesting to read. There are numerous questions and quizes in the book, designed to keep readers on track while creating their personal psychological strategies.
Bottom line: In order of importance, your average trader usually puts psychology far behind trading technique. If he worked more on understanding and developing the motivations that governed his trades, maybe he wouldn’t be so average.
Buy the book and plan on reading it numerous times.
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|The Book of Platitudes,
I bought this book expecting to gain some insights into the psychology of trading. I received one big insight: Don’t just research the markets – research books about the markets before buying! Mr. Kiev entreats us to: “Find your weaknesses and eliminate them… Seek your psychological stumbling blocks and overcome them… Determine what restrains you from trading freely and well – and cast these things aside…” And so on -ad infinitum; ad nauseum. Step two – the next logical step – the “How” to do these things is not a part of this book. Perhaps the author will publish a sequel: “Ari Makes Even More Money.” Please do not buy this book.
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|A “how to” on Life…..oh, and trading too.,
If you’ve read any books on zen or books like the The Inner Game of Tennis and came away with a little something extra then this book will fit perfectly into your library of READ books. For me, it was really a book about trusting your yourself, your gut, trusting your feal and not getting sidetracked by the conscious brain, anxiety, down days, trusting the work you’ve put into something, understanding your anxiety, not running from your fears, but rather coddling them, and not letting them run your decision making process. Yes, it’s a ‘how to’ for trading, but its also something a little more intelligent (useful for the real world too). By reading this book, you put your faith in Ari and his successful devotees such as Steve Cohen (forward) who have been incredibly successful in trusting their feal and you learn to trust yourself. Yes, some people have better feal than others. But, what trade to win tries to impress that will help you get closer to victory is that its the trusting yourself (not getting sidetracked), visualizing, taking calculated positions-not gambling, setting realistic/yet stretch goals that help you steadily build up your success rate (applicable really to anything, not just trading). Put it this way, I found so much of value in this book on trading, analysis, and life, that the book is totally marked up and I’m probably going to HAVE to buy another copy. Really worth while for amateur traders, pro traders, non-traders, portfolio managers and analysts alike, and anybody for that matter.
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