I have been called upon to write another blog today with good reasons. As usual,  I short-circuit  to reproduce what I have written for my own newsletter Idkit, as the topic is equally conducive to becoming a good trader.

Here goes:  http://awanginvest.com/?p=975

Elkonon Goldberg notes in his The Executive Brain text that attention, planning, reasoning are functions of the brain’s frontal cortex. His research suggests that by utilizing brain functions, we exercise brain regions and strengthen their functions like going to a gym builds our muscles and endurance.

Over time, we can build our brain’s capacity for intention by exercising the frontal cortex functions. We can look at lifting weights as the best way to build our strength, engaging in sustained, directed efforts to cultivate our intentional capacities.

Become Your Own Trading Coach, Dr Brett Steenbarger’s new weblog, also the title of his forthcoming book of same name, will be instructive  to traders to self-coach in all aspects of becoming a good trader.

In Enhancing Trader Performance , Dr Brett describes the dynamic of talents leads to interests leads to immersion in skill building leads to competence leads to further flow and the eventful development of elite performance.

“It is the interplay between the flow state and the development of intentionality that creates accelerated learning curves: without flow, talents have no place to go; they never evolve into elite skills.”

Without the flow, there is no motivation to sustain efforts leading traders to sabotage themselves with impulsive trades.

The first step to performance development is practice but before this step, there should be play. Elite performers never stop playing, for example, concert pianists improvise as well as practise on the piano keyboard for hours daily.

As newbies, we should paper trade first in parallel to live trading with entry, stop and profit target.

By playing with paper trading, we can discover niches that will build mental muscles to lead to higher performance.

On the same note, it is also vital that we ‘play’ in the gym for an hour or less, say three times a week,  preferably before the start of our working day, to exercise our brain and build our muscles to keep mind and body fit to take the stress out of trading. Or we will end up with Distress.

Stress can facilitate performance but Distress can impair one’s ability to focus and correct an action.

We need to play and exercise to be in top form, in whatever we set out to achieve.

I await with great anticipation to read Dr Brett’s new book when out next year, to become my own coach and student.

IDKIT

Ag Moderator

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