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  Many traders that I work with involve me in their performance reviews.  Sometimes they create weekly reviews, sometimes monthly or quarterly.  Invariably these reviews summarize what they did wrong over this period and how they could improve.  They set lots of goals, but then that's often the last I hear about those goals until the next review period! There are three big problems with the goal-setting of many (and perhaps most) traders: 1)  Too Many Goals - By setting a large number of goals, traders have difficulties prioritizing the changes they want to make, and they find it difficult to give each of the goals proper attention.  As a result, they chronically feel as though they are falling short in achieving their goals and lose motivation.  Goals should move us forward, not discourage us! 2)  Vague Goals - A trader may set a goal of trading with greater discipline, so that they stop overtrading.  Great!  How are they going to do ...

  I thought I would do something different with this blog and actually chronicle the development of new edges in my trading.  I'll post my successes and failures and learning lessons, with an eye toward trading psychology and also the psychology of the things I'm trading. One lesson that I've learned from working with the traders at SMB Capital is that their success is as much about *what* they trade as *how* they trade.  Both are quite important, of course, but if one is trading directionally and the stock, index, or asset being traded simply isn't moving, there won't be a lot of opportunity.  During this recent period of "meme trading", I've also noticed that very high levels of movement are not necessarily very high opportunities for profit.  We don't just want things that move; we also need them to move in meaningful and predictable ways. When we trade suboptimal trading vehicles, it has the same potential impact on our results as utilizing su...

  Very little has been written in trading psychology about innovation.  And yet, wherever I've encountered traders and portfolio managers with longstanding track records of success, I've seen evidence of innovation.  The innovator is the one who asks really good questions, really original questions.  The innovator is the one who sees changes in market behavior and wants to figure out what that's all about and how to take advantage of it.   When we become completely P/L focused, there's little bandwidth left for innovation.  Superior trading requires an absorption in markets; superior good idea generation requires getting away from screens and seeing a bigger picture. On a recent trip to Nashville, I had plenty of time away from screens and started asking simple questions, but questions I hadn't asked before.  For instance, I wondered if the best predictors of what happens in a given equity market index (such as SPX) might come from stocks outside ...

  Above you can see the floor of my office, where well over 30 books are in various stages of being read--simultaneously!  My technique for writing is to read and read and read different authors on a given topic and eventually something jumps out at me as an integrating idea.  It's really no different from looking at charts and market information from different time frames and suddenly picking up on a directional move in the making.  Analyzing, analyzing, analyzing: that takes focus.  The creativity comes from the synthesizing:  putting it together into a coherent picture. One of the main topics of my reading is meditation.  It turns out that there are *many* different forms of meditation, many of which are quite unlike our common conception of the Eastern practice.  As I explain in the recent Forbes article , the most important function of meditation is to build focus and amplify our experience.  The problem is that the great majority of peo...