Trading psychology and Trader Performance

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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 a sec­ond com­po­nent to the exer­cise: The trad­er must vivid­ly visu­al­ize a mild­ly anx­i­ety-pro­duc­ing trad­ing sit­u­a­tion while hooked up to the biofeed­back and main­tain­ing the calm focus. Once the trad­er can repeat­ed­ly visu­al­ize this low-anx­i­ety sit­u­a­tion and sus­tain “the zone” on the biofeed­back read­out, we then move to a sec­ond, high­er-lev­el anx­i­ety sce­nario. Often it’s help­ful to…”

You can learn more about Enhanc­ing Trad­er Per­for­mance and The Psy­chol­o­gy of Trad­ing: Inter­view with Brett N. Steen­barg­er. Some key take-aways from our interview:

  • Elite per­form­ers in any high­ly-com­pet­i­tive field fol­low struc­tured learn­ing and train­ing process­es to devel­op their skills, ensur­ing con­tin­u­ous feed­back and refinement.
  • Traders would ben­e­fit to fol­low­ing this exam­ple. Tools at their dis­pos­al include books, sim­u­la­tion pro­grams, biofeed­back pro­grams for emo­tion­al man­age­ment, and coaches.
  • Spe­cif­ic skills to train are brain speed and work­ing mem­o­ry (for short-term traders), ana­lyt­i­cal skills (long-term
  • ones). For both, man­ag­ing emo­tion­al-dri­ven impul­sive behavior.

Here you have a relat­ed post on Best prac­tice for top trad­ing per­for­mance: biofeed­back, and here a visu­al exam­ple of Emo­tion­al self-reg­u­la­tion through biofeed­back.

Final­ly, a reminder that the Freeze-Framer sys­tem is now called emWave.