[.uk] Trading to Win: The Psychology of Mastering the Markets

Amazon.com Review:
Buy low, sell high. Sounds simple? Hardly. As most traders will tell you, finding the right entry and exit points in a market is too often a stressful and even gut-wrenching experience. Ari Kiev, author of Trading to Win, wants to change all that. Kiev spent five years with a group of professional traders at SAC Capital Management, a $500 million hedge fund, studying the psychological and emotional aspects of what makes for a successful trader. Kiev found that what hinders many traders is ego, fear, emotion, and "false beliefs about yourself and the markets." Gaining mastery as a trader means seeing "the market as it is, not as a reference point for your own existence." Kiev advocates a disciplined, Zen-like approach to the markets that begins with articulating a specific goal then committing oneself to attaining that goal in the most objective way possible, overcoming the emotional baggage that too often leads to poor decision-making. Trading to Win is for professional and amateur traders of every stripe who are looking for insight into their own behavior and approach to the markets. --Harry C. Edwards

The Softer Side of Trading:
Ari Kiev's book Trading to Win might seem like just psycho-babble to some traders. That is odd, given that some of these same critics are devout followers of technical analysis, which premises that psychology factors firmly into market movements. Why then is it such heresy to believe that you can improve the performance of a trader by working on his psychology? It is not a strange concept to Steve Cohen, who hired Ari Kiev as a "trading coach" for his hedge fund S.A.C. Kiev, who was profiled in Jack Schwager's Stock Market Wizards , teaches that traders need to stretch themselves in the goals they set. They also need to eliminate the negative thinking that prevents them from reaching those goals. Much of Trading to Win is thus actually "common sense" (as is most psychology, it seems), but sometimes it is useful to hear someone reiterate sound principles. One principle for which critics have taken Kiev to task is his suggestion that traders should set or raise their profit goals, which seems like a veritable "no no" from a risk management perspective. The criticism misses the fact, however, that Kiev is really saying that raising your performance goals means raising your work ethic. What are you going to do to raise your game? Squeezing out extra percentage points of return requires getting onto the trading floor hours earlier (or hours later) than you normally would-and researching companies more assiduously on paper or by working the phones harder. Moreover, Kiev actually recommends stricter risk management through such time-tested techniques as understanding your reasons for each trade, as well as the setting of target entry and exit prices. He also wants you to figure out if fears and doubts are keeping you from cutting your losses and riding your winners. This book is clearly not for everyone; it is easily too "touchy feely" for traders concerned solely with the quantitative or more tangible aspects of trading. Kiev also tends to float heavily from topic to topic, often without a clear path. But for those traders who wonder how "fixing their heads" might result in greater success, Trading to Win is definitely worth a read.

Too Repetative:
This book is about developing the right attitude and relaxing. It can be applied to almost any risk taking endeavor or competative profession. The parts that profess to teach about trading per se are not useful. This book will not teach anybody anything about buying or selling financial products. It repeats a lot of the same stuff over but the real message is to chill out and get serious about performance. Be a winner, examine your losers and why you went wrong and vow to change for the better. Again, have the right attitude and approach and learn to control stress with breathing exercises and muscle relaxation. To be a good trader, one must learn to endure stress and not react to it just to releive it but focus on the trade and do what is right based only on the objective analysis. This is hard to do because it is pleasurable to close out a trade and avoid the stress of being in it. The book is useful in order to help one focus and work through stress. I imagine there are a number of self-help books that are similar in this regard. Nothing special.

Read it ! A Gold Mine of Skills needed to become A Master:
The Trading profession is a tough one because there is not 1 school that teaches it per say. So being only about 300 to 400 good books on trading. You need to get a bit from each and discard the rest. There are a few but very valuable pieces of information that can be applied in this book. Just because 80% of the content of a book does not apply to you does not make it bad , you have to be objective and open in your assessments. If you are a trader and want to be a Master Trader then this book is really for you. I personally only trade futures at the moment so all of the Stock examples did not really apply to me. But that does not make the book bad, there are little gems in there you will seem them sparsely around the book specially in Part 1 and Chapter 12 Chapter 12 is worth the price of the whole book on its own !! At the beginning of the book there is some really good content on behaviour modification for traders the chapters at the start of the book are worth the price of the book in it self. No book is ever the perfect book for you unless you wrote it yourself. You need to get bits and pieces from here and there and make your own. If you like Mark Douglas's "Trading in the Zone" then you will love this book. This is an absolutely excellent book, but all of the goods are in 20% of the text.

Psychology is the often overlooked intangible aspect of trading.:
Because it is unquantifiable and generally misunderstood by most traders and investors, psychology is the often overlooked intangible aspect of trading. Unlike the precise mathematical formulas used in technical analysis, we cannot easily reduce human behavior to a mathematical equation that can be plotted on a graph as a trend line or as a series of variables that we can examine in detail throughout history. That said, much current research in the social sciences is attempting to bring psychology more in line with mathematics for the precision that it gives to experimental methods. Mathematical methods are applied to behavioral science for the purpose of observing and comparing human behavior according to a set of strict numerical criteria - the only stable benchmarks that allow comparison of behavior from person to person and from time to time

A waste of time and money:
This and his other book, Trading in the Zone, are a complete waste of time. Instead, read the books by Mark Douglas (he is not even trained as a psychologist) and Richard McCall if you really want something that will change your mental makeup towards trading.