Book and Youtube Channel Recommendation – 5/27/2020
The Daily Trading Coach
-- 101 Lessons for Becoming Your Own Trading Psychologist
By Brett N. Steenbarger
A friend that I exchange information and ideas with on a regular basis gave me a link to a YouTube channel that you might want to check out. The site belongs to Brett Steenbarger one of my favorite authors on trading psychology. The YouTube site gives you short insightful videos on trading psychology. It's a new site so there are only a few videos there at this point.
Here is a link:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuF2Y4qPTnFwjzHbUNcaq1w
Seeing the YouTube site reminded me of my favorite of Brett's books, “The Daily Trading Coach”. Reading and living the ideas from this book was one of the top things that helped me become a successful trader. You are presented with 101 different lessons, each one is just a few pages. I would do one or two lessons a day. I went through the book five or six times. Even if you have a short attention span or hate reading this book can work for you.
Whether you are a new trader or you think you've mastered the technical aspects of trading and are still just breaking even I would recommend you get this book and devour it.
Here is some information from the book cover, I was going to write a detailed book review but this pretty much says it all.
“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.”
2 trades for me today with +1.5R total
1st Trade QCOM +2R
148.39/149.97 exit 143.25
12% gap down under pivot support and 50ma after a strong daily double top rejection,. I took it on a congestion breakdown with a fairly wide stop, leaving my 2R target 50c over its ATR, slow but consistent move down with great RW, hit my target on the penny before it bounced.
2nd Trade AQB -0.5R
9.40/9.70 exit 9.56
I rarely trade stocks under $10 and even more rarely short them. I liked this daily chart as it broke its uptrend channel and stayed under a strong 9.50 support line enough room to its daily 50ma. I entered after a pullback with a fairly wide stop but only 1/3 of its ATR used at the time. It failed to break down with the strong market open and stayed in a narrow range.
I actually broke my plan with this trade as I lowered my stop to a pivot where price made a big bounce earlier at 11am with a large seller sitting there. My thought was that if it breaks that level again then it will likely...
1 trade for (-1R)
I took a BD on QCOM. I was worried about the target being close to the daily range, so I took a tighter stop on the 2 min chart. I am looking through PTS right now, most of the examples have 2 options for where to put your stop. It looks to me like one of the stops would be at the bottom of the main consolidation area, and the other at the bottom of where there has been a shakeout or turnaround bar (if there has been one). Due to the daily range I took the tighter one on this. In hindsight it seems obvious to take the wider stop, but in the moment it looked ok.
I was then looking at the 15 min 3BP on QCOM, but the reason I used a tighter stop in the first place was because of the range. The 15 min 3BP would have needed to have gone even further than the wider stop on the 2 min BD, so I didn't take it.
