Recent content by Brett Steenbarger

There is significant evidence that meditation can help us deal with stressful situations, including the recent pandemic and the challenges of doctoral education, as well as mental health concerns such as depression and anxiety. The Mindful.org site, in their review of the science behind...

When I sat down to write this, I thought it would be challenging but useful, to distil over 20 years of trading experience and 25 years of specializing in brief therapy into ten lessons that I have learned whilst working with traders (including myself!). In that time, I’ve written two books on...

What I love most about trading is that it exercises the brain and the will. It involves ongoing analysis and problem solving, and it requires the steady development of performance-based skills. I'm sure serious players of chess and poker enjoy similar benefits. Talk to any successful athlete and...

Consider the following advice: * Trade what you see; * Trade the plan, and plan the trade; * Don't let emotions interfere with trading; * Don't overthink trades; go with your feel for the market. All of these are reasonable in themselves, but they also contradict one...

Many years ago, when my wife and I first made a home together with three children by a prior marriage, we encountered a problem. The kids complained that I was taking too much time in the shower in the morning, making them late for school. Upon a moment's reflection, I recognized that I indeed...

When traders lose money, they often attribute the problem to a lapse of discipline. Such a lack of consistency, however, is actually the result of many different problems--not the cause. Traders lose discipline with trading for the same reasons that dieters lose discipline with dieting or...

I recently participated in an online chat presentation for John Forman where I assembled my ideas into ten basic principles that have guided my thinking about the psychology of traders and the psychology of markets. In the very near future, if my testing continues to be promising, I hope to...

A large number of traders that I work with express the feeling that they are somehow sabotaging themselves: repeating the same mistakes day after day, giving back valuable profits in a fraction of the time it took to earn them. Their intuition is that there is some kind of pattern to what...

A chess player analyzing the board for the next move; fighter pilots maneuvering their planes to get a lock on enemy aircraft; a baseball player tracking the release of the ball from the pitcher's arm; ballet dancers executing their leaps; an oncologist diagnosing a rare form of cancer; a...

In my last article, I covered some of the pitfalls of trading journals. In this piece I'd like to cover some of the features of trading journals that I have found helpful in my work with new and experienced professional traders. My goal as a trading psychologist is to do all that I can to...

One of the most common pieces of advice trading mentors give to their students is the keeping of a trading journal. By documenting your trading, the common wisdom holds, you can learn what you're doing right and wrong and speed your learning curve. I happen to be quite a fan of trading...

"The most merciful thing in the world..." H.P. Lovecraft writes in his horror story The Call of Cthulhu, "is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents." To be sure, if all our memories and perceptions registered in the mind equally, we should be like the unfortunate Funes of...