The Daily Trading Coach: 101 Lessons for Becoming Your Own Trading Psychologist
by Brett N. Steenbarger

I am very pleased to announce that Dr. Brett Steenbarger’s new book can be ordered through Amazon. What makes this book even more interesting than most is that fact that I helped contribute to Chapter Nine, along with 17 other online professionals (bloggers I have followed and known for some time). Clearly, I consider the other 17 contributors more professional than me but I can’t discount what I have learned and have shared over the years.

I’ve been very quiet on the blog but that’s because my basic trading philosophy is buying long (stocks making new highs) which isn’t such a great idea right now and the fact that my baby is due to arrive in less than 6 weeks (priorities change). I hope to jump back in and get this blog going again when my screens show breakouts and positive risk/ reward setups. Until then, I’ll sit tight and be patient!

Remember:

• “But careful timing is essential…impatience is costly” – Jesse Livermore, 1940
• “Whenever I have had the patience to wait for the market to arrive at what I call a “Pivotal Point” before I started to trade; I have always made money in my operations” – Jesse Livermore, 1940
• “The big money is made in the first one or two years of a normal bull market cycle” – William O’Neil

Back to the book, I highly recommend it, as well as Brett’s past books; he’s such a great contributor to the trading world and an even more important fixture and influential contributor to the online investing community.

Brett’s TraderFeed Blog

From the Inside Flap:

Every trader is an entrepreneur. And just as a new business must capitalize upon the strengths of its founders, a career in the markets crucially hinges upon the assets—personal and monetary—of the trader. As an active trader and a coach of traders in hedge funds, proprietary trading groups, and investment bank settings, author Brett Steenbarger has helped others see the personal assets they have possessed all along: those that can pay a lifetime of dividends. In The Daily Trading Coach, he provides the tools to help you prioritize both your trading goals and your life—and become your own trading psychologist.

There are 101 lessons in The Daily Trading Coach, each averaging several pages in length. Each lesson follows the same general format: identifying an everyday challenge that traders face, an approach to meeting that challenge, and a specific suggestion for implementing that approach. The lessons cover a range of topics relevant to trading psychology and trading performance, including detailed instruction for utilizing psychodynamic, cognitive, and behavioral brief therapy methods to change problematic behavior patterns and instill new, positive ones. The chapters are independent of one another, so that you can read them in order or you can use the Table of Contents or Index to read, each day, the lesson that most applies to your current trading. In addition, the book includes insightful self-coaching perspectives from eighteen successful trading professionals who share their work online.

While the aim of the book is to help you become your own trading coach, its broader purpose is to help you coach yourself through life. The challenges and uncertainties you face in trading—the pursuit of rewards in the face of risks—are just as present in careers and relationships as in markets. The Daily Trading Coach provides a road map, and a practical set of insights and tools, for discovering and implementing the best within you.

Click here for a complete linkable list of Contributors to The Daily Trading Coach

Thank you Dr. Brett!

I’ve been meaning to post up my review of Brian Shannon’s new book, Technical Analysis Using Multiple Timeframes, for quite some time but as I have already mentioned, my schedule has been crazy. Well, I was able to sit down and write a brief but hopefully a helpful review.

The book starts with a chapter on technical analysis which I recently listed as one of the 10 steps to profitable trading. I agree with Brian 100% that any person that wishes to become a successful trader must learn and start to master some aspect of technical analysis. He clearly identifies that technical analysis is not about memorizing chart patterns or funky images but about understanding the motivations of participants which may help in anticipating future moves. This is a game of anticipation more so than speculation if you play by a set of rules and attempt to do it professionally. Overall, Brain nails the point that technical analysis allows a trader to view the market with some type of clarity (this may differ from one person to another – especially in multiple time frames).

He says: “price is the only thing that pays”. Very simple but true. All the tools and gadgets in the world can’t and won’t help you trade more efficiently than using simple price action which can be monitored through charts or technical analysis. He says, in other words of course, that technical analysis is not an exact science and will not predict every move but it should allow an experienced trader make sense of the movement(s) they are viewing.

I loved the first chapter because I felt I was reading my own thoughts (almost word for word).

The next four chapters focus on the four stages of a stock’s cycle or movement (in Brian’s opinion and I don’t disagree):
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