Given the stock mar­ket per­for­mance these days, Brett Steen­barger offers timely tips and resources for traders on man­ag­ing stress and self-confidence: Updated Psy­chol­ogy of Trad­ing Resources, includ­ing a list of rel­e­vant blogs such as Afraid to Trade blog, Trader Psy­chol­ogy blog, the Head Coach blog, his Stock Mar­ket Psy­chol­ogy blog and Smart Trader blog.

He also offers very good advice to build self-confidence, which can be use­ful to us all, no mat­ter our pro­fes­sion: When Traders Lose Con­fi­dence — Part Two: Chang­ing Your Self-Talk .

• “The key to chang­ing the self-talk is to become aware of when you’re doing it. Most often, the neg­a­tive talk is auto­matic. Jour­nals are effec­tive because they force us to reflect on our think­ing and inter­rupt those auto­matic pat­terns. Sim­i­larly, I’ve had great results work­ing with traders who talk their thoughts out loud into a tape recorder and then play them back. It’s an excel­lent way to become aware of your think­ing, stand apart from it, and break the flow.”
• “Yet another strat­egy is to go through guided visu­al­iza­tions of chal­leng­ing mar­ket sce­nar­ios while you’re calm and focused (before trad­ing starts) and then men­tally rehearse the self-talk you’d like to engage in dur­ing those sit­u­a­tions. This helps to build new, pos­i­tive pat­terns of self-talk.
• “The key to all these strate­gies is rep­e­ti­tion: you’re train­ing your­self to process infor­ma­tion in new ways, and such train­ing requires practice.”

You may enjoy our inter­view with Brett N. Steen­barger on Enhanc­ing Trader Per­for­mance. And learn more on other tech­niques at Best prac­tice for top trad­ing per­for­mance: biofeed­back and solu­tions for Traders.

Pro­fes­sor, trader and author Brett Steen­barger, one of the main experts on Trad­ing psy­chol­ogy and Trader Per­for­mance (see our inter­view with him here), just announced he will speak at a Free Inter­ac­tive Webi­nar on Trader Performance

• “Dur­ing the Webi­nar, I will sum­ma­rize and elab­o­rate basic ideas from my book and also intro­duce new ideas devel­oped and applied since the book’s pub­li­ca­tion. A unique fea­ture of the ses­sion will be a par­tic­i­pant Q&A mod­er­ated by Steve.” (Steven Buss, a mem­ber of the NeoTicker forum)

He recently wrote a great post on My Favorite Tech­niques for Over­com­ing Per­for­mance Anx­i­ety in Trad­ing, includ­ing a won­der­ful tech­nique (see arti­cle to read the full description)

• “Of late, I’ve been mak­ing use of heart rate vari­abil­ity feed­back through the Freeze-Framer pro­gram, which offers a nice graph­i­cal inter­face to help users track their progress and visu­ally deter­mine whether or not they’re in “the zone”.
• “Once the trader becomes adept at this, I then add Read the rest of this entry »

Brett N. Steen­barger , Ph.D. Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor of Psy­chi­a­try and Behav­ioral Sci­ences at SUNY Upstate Med­ical Uni­ver­sity, active trader for over 30 years, for­mer Direc­tor of Trader Devel­op­ment for Kingstree Trad­ing, LLC, author of The Psy­chol­ogy of Trad­ing and the new Enhanc­ing Trader Per­for­mance, and of the blog Trader­Feed: Exploit­ing the edge from his­tor­i­cal mar­ket pat­terns, is writ­ing a great col­lec­tion of best prac­tices for traders (many of which are very rel­e­vant for all high-pressure occupations).

He wrote a great arti­cle a few weeks ago on the value of biofeed­back in achiev­ing self con­trol, and now deep­ens the dis­cus­sion with this best prac­tice for traders.

Both arti­cles are a fun read-here go some quotes from the most recent one

• “This best prac­tice describes biofeed­back as a tool for per­for­mance enhance­ment among traders. It empha­sizes that the role of biofeed­back is to keep us in touch with our (implicit) knowl­edge, not to elim­i­nate emo­tion from the decision-making process.”

• “we want to con­trol the level of cog­ni­tive and phys­i­cal arousal so that we retain access to exper­tise that is already present. Biofeed­back is a pow­er­ful tool for achiev­ing such cog­ni­tive and phys­i­cal con­trol.”
• “Through struc­tured prac­tice, peo­ple can learn to sys­tem­at­i­cally improve their abil­ity to enter and remain in states of calm focus. Such abil­ity is impor­tant to trad­ing (and many other per­for­mance activ­i­ties), not because it elim­i­nates emo­tion, but because it pre­serves our access to the somatic mark­ers that rep­re­sent our mar­ket feel. The heart rate vari­abil­ity feed­back is par­tic­u­larly user friendly, because it is com­puter based and can track progress both in prac­tice ses­sions and in real time performance.”
• “Using the Freeze-Framer pro­gram, audi­ble sig­nals tell the user when he or she is expe­ri­enc­ing high, medium, or low “coher­ence”, which is a mea­sure of emo­tional reg­u­la­tion. On-screen games require the user to keep a float­ing bal­loon in the air, for instance, based upon sus­tained medium and high read­ings. I recently had an inter­est­ing expe­ri­ence dur­ing one feed­back ses­sion: I sus­tained a high level of the bal­loon, but then clicked a wrong but­ton on the screen and erased my data acci­den­tally! After that frus­tra­tion, it was *much* harder for me to keep the bal­loon in the air. It was a nice illus­tra­tion of the impact of frus­tra­tion even sev­eral min­utes after an event.”

You can learn more about this best prac­tice for Traders and other high-pressure occu­pa­tions where learn­ing how to iden­tify and man­age our emo­tions and lev­els of stress is crit­i­cal for performance.

Big party today. Car­ni­vals everywhere. 

Car­o­line and I admit we are quite biased. We see the world through our own lenses. Which, these days, means a lot of pas­sion for the science-based Brain Fit­ness Rev­o­lu­tion. We have been try­ing hard to com­bine fun brain teasers with seri­ous posts on how brain research is start­ing to influ­ence Edu­ca­tion, Health and Train­ing, and are thank­ful that these efforts are start­ing to pay off-Mission Accomplishing!

The week­end started very well. Kevin from IQ Cor­ner and Tick­Tock­BrainTalk had brought great early aus­pices by intro­duc­ing a Sharp­Brains feed box into his blog. A num­ber of trad­ing blogs, includ­ing Brett Steenbarger’s and Trader Mike’s, enjoyed our posts on trader per­for­mance and biofeedback.

Today has been the full Car­ni­val day. Read the rest of this entry »

Brett Steen­barger, the renowned expert in Trader Per­for­mance and author of the blog Trader­Feed: Exploit­ing the edge from his­tor­i­cal mar­ket pat­terns, among many things, just posted a kind note on our Peak Performance/ emo­tional man­age­ment solu­tion for traders.

He says: “This is the first biofeed­back appli­ca­tion that I’m aware of that is uniquely mar­keted to traders. I’ve used biofeed­back to mon­i­tor my body’s level of arousal dur­ing trad­ing and have found it to be quite useful.”

How does this work?

Traders, or any­one involved in very com­plex and rapidly evolv­ing envi­ron­ments, need to make split sec­ond deci­sions based on sound logic, instead of emo­tional impulses. It is not easy to deal with frus­tra­tion, for exam­ple, when a trade doesn’t go the way we antic­i­pate. Stress can also cause us to miss new pat­terns in the mar­ket, thereby pre­vent­ing us from adapt­ing to, and suc­ceed­ing in, new circumstances.

A biofeedback-based Peak Performance/Stress Man­age­ment pro­gram may be use­ful, because a tool such as The Freeze-Framer biofeed­back sys­tem pro­vides real-time visual feed­back on our “inter­nal per­for­mance” and helps us iden­tify and learn how to man­age the emo­tional arousal that can dis­rupt exec­u­tive func­tions: judg­ment, plan­ning, ana­lyz­ing, and rea­son­ing. The graphs above show the dif­fer­ence in our body rhythms between frus­tra­tion and the smooth tar­get pat­tern of “The Zone” in an opti­mal learn­ing process and peak performance.

For more infor­ma­tion on Trader Per­for­mance, an inter­view with Brett Steen­barger, or to buy this this pro­gram, click on Brain Fit­ness Pro­gram for Traders. You may also want to learn more about find­ing your trad­ing niche.

Enjoy,

Alvaro