Enhancing Trader Performance: Proven Strategies From the Cutting Edge of Trading Psychology

by Brett N. Steenbarger

Through his own trading experiences and those of individuals he has mentored, Dr. Brett Steenbarger is familiar with the challenges that traders face and the performance and psychological strategies that can meet those challenges. In Enhancing Trader Performance, Steenbarger shows you how to transform talent into trading skill through a structured process of expertise development and reveals how this approach can help you achieve market mastery.

Genres: Psychology, Finance, Business, Nonfiction

306 pages, Kindle Edition

First published November 1, 2006

Reviews

[An Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The central argument: Trading is a performance discipline, and to excel, traders must systematically build, measure, and refine their skills through deliberate practice.

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Key Takeaways:

1. Trading as a Performance Sport
• Great traders approach markets like elite athletes approach competition—by training, reviewing, and learning constantly.
• Success comes less from “natural talent” and more from structured skill development.

2. The Role of Deliberate Practice
• Traders improve not by trading more, but by reviewing trades, identifying strengths/weaknesses, and practicing specific improvements.
• Journaling, metrics, and self-reflection are key.

3. Developing Your Trading Niche
• Not every trader can excel in every strategy.
• Steenbarger emphasizes finding a “niche” that aligns with your personality, risk tolerance, and strengths, then mastering it deeply.

4. The Psychology of Resilience
• Emotional control, adaptability, and resilience separate consistent traders from inconsistent ones.
• Setbacks should be viewed as feedback loops, not failures.

5. Mentorship and Communities
• Traders accelerate growth by learning from mentors, peers, and trading groups.
• Isolation slows learning—feedback is critical.

6. Continuous Performance Review
• Traders should track results like athletes track stats: win rate, risk/reward, expectancy, adherence to plan.
• Improvement comes from analyzing process as much as outcome.

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Strengths:

✅ Practical blend of psychology and performance science with trading application.
✅ Actionable advice (journaling, deliberate practice, mentoring).
✅ Real-world examples from coaching traders at professional firms.
✅ Focuses on how to learn and improve, not just “what to trade.”

Weaknesses:

❌ Less tactical “trading strategy” content—this is about mindset and performance, not technical setups.
❌ Requires self-discipline to apply—concepts won’t help if you don’t implement them.

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Final Verdict:

Enhancing Trader Performance is one of the most valuable books for traders who want to move from dabbling to professional-level execution. Steenbarger reframes trading as a skill that can be trained, measured, and improved like any other high-performance discipline. It’s essential reading for traders serious about longevity and mastery.

[erjan avid reader]

update1: i m on chapter 3 and can say the book gives some very deep insight into what generates and sustains our flow experience. The book is worth reading to all traders.

a very good insight illustrates this: once self-awareness of your ability to trade diminishes you become less certain you will succeed.

Tim's example is very helpful to me: I feel like i could turn out to be same trader: i find my trading niche, i trade profitably, the market changes and a trader is unable to adapt and relearn.

I find this very illustrating of my own path in trading... so far, i like the book!

upd2: i can place this book on the No.1 spot, same spot that i have given to the famous "trading in the zone" by mike douglas.
upd3: this book is a sobering read, cuz it tells me amazing performance is a hard work - reading 100 books and attending 100 seminars will only produce a knowledgable AMATEUR!

i guess i find myself to be on this path to becoming only an amateur rookie trader...
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i think twice about becoming a trader, cuz it describes that even elite traders experience drawdowns and slumps.
anyways, this was a great read.

[Katja Riya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Жесткая книга по психологии трейдинга, о том, как не тупить на любительском уровне, а пахать-пахать-пахать до уровня мастера, а иначе зачем?)
Вдохновляющая и пугающая.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There are old traders and bold traders, but no old, bold traders."
--Old stock market saying

Recommended for anyone curious about what it's like to trade, or anyone interested in psychological aspects of investing. If you're not an active trader but considering it, this book will teach you quite a lot about what it might be like for you, and what problems and challenges you're likely to face.

I am not ... [see the rest on my book review site.]

[Zord Guts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shares some great exercises that can be integrated into a trader's process. Heck, they can also be implemented in other performance fields with a little bit of modifications. These exercises improve my performance to the extent I apply and practice them, so it's still early to say how they will improve my game. Will come back in the future to write my experience

[Stephen Chung · Rating 4 out of 5]

Should have read this book more than 10 yeats ago when I first bought it. Could havesaved so mich time, money, and headache. Every person considering trading must read this book.

[Asoka Selvarajah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is like a course in trading and performance psychology, all by itself. Worth every dollar. I took to highlighting parts I thought were important, and sometimes large sections of a single page got highlighted: very few pages went unmarked.

I have other courses on psychology of trading and they are excellent. However, this book covered aspects that I had not encountered anywhere else, and gave some very refreshing and deep insights. It has a heavy and valuable emphasis upon performance training, analogous to what is being done in sports training these days.

For example, his take on paper trading is that it can be used to practice and drill various aspects of performance until you have perfected them; much as marines drill certain activities over and over again until they are automatic, and they can even do them in the dark. Hence, in this version of paper trading, you are not even looking to make a paper profit, but rather mastering various aspects of the process of trading itself, and thereby giving yourself additional experience through constant exposure to the markets.

He talks about the need to try out different kinds of trading first, in a harmless fashion, in order to find your trading niche, i.e. what you most enjoy and are most talented at. In other words, a short-term scalper might be no good trying to be a long-term investor, and vice-versa. You have to find your own instrument, your own trading niche and your own timeframe.

There is far more that could be said, but the the best thing I can say is that if you are serious about getting truly PROFESSIONAL at your trading, then you need to read this book and make notes or highlights!

[Piotr Karaś · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent book for developing traders. I've collected lots of quotes from it. I can't help mentioning some of them:
- "The best traders I have known and worked with are tinkerers. They have refined their trading over time, and failure has been their greatest teacher."
- "When you have found your niche, you don’t need discipline to do the right things; you won’t want to do anything else."
- "The hardest thing for the best traders is not to lose money; it’s to stop trading when losing money. They are so competitive that they accept defeat only with the greatest of reluctance."
-"While you’re trading, you’re the trader. All other times, you’re the mentor to that trader."
-"Only once you succeed in avoiding your negative trading patterns at the smallest size do you increase your size very gradually."

[Dmytro · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best content is found in the first half of this book.
This book focuses on several key areas:
1) Identifying your ideal trading style or market
2) The process of learning to trade
3) Dealing with emotional and psychological aspects of trading.

In terms of 1) identifying your style/market, the author classifies people between two dimensions. The first dimension is stimulation seeking vs. stability seeking. The second dimension is analytical thinking vs. intuitive thinking. These two dimensions create four quadrants which describe different types of trading.
2) Skill development - trading is like anything else (playing piano or a sport) the skills can be broken down into sub-skills and mastered in pieces
3) Psychological aspect is pretty self explanatory. Trading exposes people to huge swings in emotions in both positive and negative directions.

[Philski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, but really trading was just one application of the principles. I found the principles within applied to many other decision making areas of life. Good book on basically how to 'be your own mentor' and correct decision making patterns by recognizing bad decision making (or gut decision that are wrong) then using a journal to rationalize the decisions and explain the incorrect behaviour and then train to remove the emotion from those decisions as you correct the pattern.

[Ahmet Kara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite books on trading. The author takes trading as a performance field (just like athletics or chess or ballet), and beautifully puts together his perspectives on how to gain competence and expertise. The book is full of thought-provoking arguments which help a lot in enhancing trading performance (as its name implies).

I've read this book first time in 2008, and this has been my second time.

[Dung Bui · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is for everyone who want to improve their performance in literally any fields, the author just happens to take trading as a specific example to demonstrate it.