Just finished....

The psychology of trading by Brett N. Steenbarger.

As mentioned before, I'm trying to read up as much as possible on trading so I'll give a quick review of each book here when I'm done.

I'd give this one a seven out of ten. Basically, this guy is a therapist by profession but also trades in his spare time. He uses stories about his patients' troubles and relates them to the problems we face in the markets.

Some of it was fascinating and I found his theme very interesting that there is more than one person (or trader) inside of us, each trying to express himself. You have the disciplined guy, the wreckless guy, the gambler etc. Each is trying for control of your mouse and you need to let the right one through.

One of the downsides is that it was quite Americanised. Not sure if I can explain what that is but most of his patients for example, all seemed to have problems that stemmed back to their youth, and blaming the parents was a common theme. That kind of crap they go on with bores me sometimes and they don't seem to have the 'get on with it' attitude we have over in Ireland.

To be honest, some of these people that go to therapy over there should just cop themselves on, simple as that. Those are the negatives but I enjoyed most of it.

He describes how we need to become our own 'internal observer' and this theme is something similar I wrote about before - about stepping away from the situation and kind of observing what you are doing from 'afar' .

It probably could have been shortened but overall, it was a pretty good read.

I've started reading High Performance Trading: 35 Practical Strategies and Techniques To Enhance Your Trading Psychology and Performance

So far so good. I've read some other books on the topic and will try review when I get time.

Last night, I ordered The Disciplined Trader so I await that one in the post.


Not trying to say that we can learn everything from books - far from it - but I usually find a couple of useful bits of info in each and definitely feel I've learned more since I started reading up as much as I can.