The Trading Athlete: Winning the Mental Game of Online Trading 1st Edition

For both new and experienced traders, The Trading Athlete is a welcome addition to the subject of understanding the importance of trading psychology. Trading is a very difficult profession if you are not mentally prepared. By using sports analogies and comparing the athlete to the trader, the authors provide an easy-to-understand approach to the subject matter. Having traded equities and futures for the past eight years, I've concluded that conquering trading psychology is 90% of the battle to becoming a consistent and profitable trader. Trading psychology is such a critical aspect of trading that I included two chapters on the subject in my book Day Trading on the Edge: A Look Before You Leap Guide to Extreme Investing.The authors, a sports psychologist and online trader (with prior trading experience at the CME and CBOT, and currently a trading coach) have produced a clearly written, easy-to-read book that supplements books by Dr. Alexander Elder, Ari Kiev, and Mark Douglas among the best books on trading psychology.The major subjects covered in this book include:- Mental keys-Confidence building and dealing with failure-How to handle losses-Replacing negative thinking with productivity-Handling pressure-Why trading for revenge is a disaster-How to overcome fear and prevent panic-How to concentrate-Enjoying your successEach chapter is sprinkled with appropriate quotes that bring home the key points.The Trading Athlete provides a self-evaluation form covering: goal setting, confidence, positive trading attitude, energizing, anger management, pressure, concentration, and flow. It also provides actual relaxation strategies to reduce stressAlso included in an appendix is a summary of the key points (4-10 or more) of each chapter. There are also very useful worksheets that can be used to record your own mission statement including your strengths, weaknesses, and goals. Additional worksheets are provided for recording your trading rules, goals for the week, month and year with checklists to determine if you are meeting them. Another worksheet covers a weekly performance log for recording each trade, its outcome and your comments about it.In summary, the Trading Athlete, if read carefully and if you use the worksheets provided, will provide you with a solid foundation for understanding yourself and conquering your trading fears and inadequacies. Ultimately your trading should improve for the better. This book is an excellent resource for all traders. I highly recommend this book.

This book was recommended to me to read. At first I found the terminology a bit disconcerting, the reference to a trader as an "online trading athlete" and your trading environment as a "trading stadium". However if you look past this you will find that this book is definitely one of the best books to improve your trading performance.I have read numerous trading books in the past and many business books. The Trading Athlete has probably the best information on goal setting I have ever come across. It is very specific and makes sure that the goals you set are actually achievable.The notion of performance cues is very helpful and definitely brings you back into the zone. The reference to various sports in the book (basketball, baseball, golf and others) actually helps you appreciate and understand trading to a higher level. With trading you need a strategy and an approach. This book will help you fine-tune your approach no matter what level of experience you have, highly recommended.

As an experienced trader, I am amazed I have not encountered a book like this one until now. Over the past few months, I have applied the principles of this book to my trading. I am amazed at the results. It's not so much that I improved my ability to see better trades, but it taught me how to prevent the bad trades. It has brought consistency to my trading days. It has helped me block out the distractions in my life when it comes time to trade. I think the best thing about the book is that it explains the problems all traders face in a framework we can understand, and then provides a path to improve. I can't say enough about this book. If you don't follow the principles of this book, you won't be a trader for long.

I did have great expectation on this book. I had been quite disappointed. Instead of elaborating on the similarities for playing pro sports and trading, it's more like a business management book emphasizing on setting achievable, strategic, measurable, controllable, flexible and positive goals of daily, weekly, monthly and yearly time span. I am not kidding. The authors did put tables of the above goals for you to fill in te blank. Though the authors also had chapters on motivation, concentration, pressure handling, routine setting, loss handling stuff but the coverage of them, in my opinion as a veteran trader and frequent trading book lover, were far from sufficient and sophisticated to help traders to turn themselves into a pro athlete and win this highly competitive game. The analogy is brilliant, but is only limited to the title. The content is not. It's just like reading one of those common psychology or life management books.

Outstanding. Helped me a lot!

this book gives you a step by step approach to getting, and maintaining the proper mind set needed to trade successfuly.easy reading, and recommended.

At first, i was enthoused by the uplifting style in which the book is written. That is an asset in itselft as it contributes to giving you a positive attitude. But once you have finished the book and try to elaborate some plan to implement some long term goals, you reckon that there is no specific help on how to define short term goals which is in essence the most important message of the book. It is apparent that the autors have extensive experience sport psychology and i think the book is actually more helpful if you are into weight lifting than into trading as it is somewhat more difficult to formulate goals that relate to emotional issues than easily measurable results in sports (power, speed etc.) and fixing short term monetary goals is counterproductive as the book states itself as the most important thing in trading is consistency. So there is no information on how to put the ideas into practise which considerabely decreases the practical value of the book.

I bought a new book but I received a super old book