A Recommendation for a Trading Psychologist

I really enjoyed One Good Trade and I’m excited to get my hands on my pre-ordered copy of The Playbook. I’ve been looking at the markets my whole life (got a solid 20 shares of INTC from Grandma when it was at 10) and began trading at a prop firm right out of college. This was in summer of 2008, and after eight months and multiple rounds of layoffs I and the other remaining three traders decided it was not going to be something we could pursue at that time. From there I went onto a fund where I continued to paper trade and started working on attaining my CMT.

Basically I took the demons that I had and disguised them under the auspice that I needed more education to “show the market who is right”. I’ve taken all that I learned and left the fund to give trading another shot. I’m currently at another firm trading my own account and finding the same “demons” coming back and effecting my P&L daily. After a month back in the saddle I have broken it down to this main issue. When I start with a losing trade early in the day, I tend to take on much more risk and skew my trades into much lower probability and much loftier “reward” views. When I begin with a winning trade, I accept the risk of the trades I take on and tend to have a much higher winning %. I’m working on using the visualization techniques from One Good Trade but wanted to know if there were other things you could recommend.

I write these things down in my detailed notebooks daily but find myself going tilt “In the heat of the moment” and have these five-minute breakdowns where I see the bids fading and instead of letting my stop “become a tail” (I convince myself it is a shake out because I don’t like the idea of having my bids whacked and watching it go without me) I remove them and watch the offers drop, rather than reversing using what the tape is showing me! Yesterday, I was able to use this on NFLX and fight my urge to short the rally and went long, enjoying a nice trade higher rather than fighting it.

I know this is something I will overcome but am not sure how to break it down and attack. I would love if you could recommend a trading psychologist or any tactics you have seen help other traders over come this.

Thanks,

Jeff

PS: Is there any way you could share how you guys do screen capture and review? Maybe if you filmed someone going over their past trade and the things they are looking at it would probably be very helpful. Thanks for sharing all you have learned over your years of teaching/training. It’s a tough industry but one that I think is worth the fight.

@mikebellafiore

I love your obvious passion for trading and perseverance. If a trader does not make it at SMB I am sure to remind them of this:

Did you really fail? You traded at one firm, after taking one training program, use one strategy to attack the markets, during one market, and one small period of time. What can that really tell you about your potential to trade?

In The PlayBook there is a wonderful section describing a trader I nickname Rudy. Rudy was one of the smartest traders I have trained but needed to work on himself first before he could become consistently profitable. The demons are inside all of us. The past few days they been coming quicker for me as I am exhausted day and night with the recent birth of our son, Luke. I have noticed I have not been quite myself the past few days. And when demons are getting the better of us, we are producing trading data at our worst. This is not trading data that will give us an accurate picture of our trading ability.

Our traders have worked with excellent trading psychologists in the past. Depending on the skill level of the trader and their needs we work with different coaches. For you I would recommend Dr. Andrew Menaker. I love his work. He has worked with a few of our traders and helped them considerably. I would also say that all high-level traders ought to have a trading psychologist and not just those who are struggling. How many coaches help LeBron? Great coaching is needed for all elite performers to play at their highest level.

Keep working on your game!

You can be better tomorrow than you are today!

Mike Bellafiore

The PlayBook

One Good Trade