some other sites to add http://traderfeed.blogspot.com http://www.brettsteenbarger.com https://enlightenedtraders.wordpress.com https://www.thedisciplinedtrader.com/masteryprogram http://traderselfcontrol.com www.daytradingpsychology.com www.highperformanceglobal.com http://tradingcomposure.com http://www.psychtrader.com https://tradingpsychologyedge.com www.andrewmenaker.com www.vantharp.com www.robindayne.com www.tradingontarget.com www.therethinkgroup.net www.daytradingcourse.com/cd http://howoftrading.com
If you have a real edge it will affect your psychology. You will trade much better. One reason for that is that you know (if you adhere to the tenets of risk management) that you will succeed. It then becomes a scenario where you just need to not do dumb stuff. Knowing you have an edge is the only way to really mitigate doubt in yourself. If you think you have an edge, or you feel that you have an edge, that's not good enough. You have to know. Also, I'm not sure I can really say this is 'psychology' but the Richard Wyckoff stuff is good. It will help you see the big picture. Wyckoff can help you get ahead of the action. But if you really want to be ahead of the action, then you need something unfair, something that even most algo's aren't using.
I strongly agree with the connection between real edge with it impacting your psychology. Yet, the problem is that there's often other forces not related to trading that's sabotaging your psychology while you're trading regardless to your real edge. These other forces are so strong...they effectively minimizes the real edge to the point that the trader is not able to effectively apply their real edge. Something else, I was looking at a recent list of traders at this forum that's been recommended as traders (members) at this forum to "learn things from" as all the other lists before that... I notice a commonality among these traders. Many on the list either do not believe in psychology and its impact on ones trading results and a few have been very vocal about such or they've posted public messages that psychology is like voodoo. The point I'm making is that its tough for many traders to get so many mixed messages. Someone they have learned from and has helped their trading. At the same time, they're not able to make that next step to consistent profits, trade for a living and so on due to the realization that those they're learning from do not believe or underestimate the value of psychology on one's trading performance. I really do not call anyone out that's being do such here at ET mainly for selfish reasons such as hoping they're on the other side of my trades. That above belief seems silly and selfish but I do not want traders to be smart enough to understand the impact of psychology on their trade performance that it makes trading a little more difficult for myself. Trading is tough. Its damn tough and about as far as I will go is to tell people the psychology is extremely important...learn as much as possible about particular types of topics involving the psychology (e.g. Behavioural Finance, Cognitive Decision Making Process) but you aren't going to see me recommend any specific books or whatever because I know edges in trading is much more than just a trade strategy...the last thing I want to do is give my competition a specific tool to compete against me. Simply, I"m very OK with the fact that many traders concentrate their trading efforts on their trade strategy / trading plan with very little of it involving psychology of the trader. Just the same, I'm very OK with the fact that the forum owner of ET has moved the Psychology section further down on the list of sections here at his forum in comparison to where it use to be located. Heck, even the "Hook Up" section is now higher on the forum list than Psychology when in the past it was lower on the list of forum sections. wrbtrader
For sure. Like anchoring to a number will happen if you are aware of anchoring or not. Of course you can take precautions though. I don't want to hear anyone give a hard number on things I trade to anchor me to that number. I certainly don't want to know what 20 random projections are on the S&P 500. Availability heuristic is something I always try to think about too. I noticed it when oil crashed. I have barely looked at oil companies the last decade but right away "dopey monkey brain says buy XOM". Only because that was the first company that came to mind because of lack of research. It is already too late though at that point to start researching because everything is already poisoned by bias. Research will just be finding data to back up buying XOM. I didn't buy XOM or anything oil related. Steenbarger and Douglas though I have found completely useless. Maybe even counter productive with my expectations higher thinking I had fixed something by reading a book.
How do I know I have a real edge? Most of us are not that self assured and self confident. Self doubt in a probabilistic world is very common, fake edge due to dumb luck is also very common.