Brain Hacks For Traders: Hijack Your Mind Skyrocket Your Profits

by Harvey Walsh

Your brain is your biggest barrier to success in the markets. It doesn’t have to be this way. Discover ingenious techniques to overcome fear, greed, and the cognitive biases that are sapping your profit potential.Trading should be easy, but sometimes our brains make it tough. It’s not our fault, evolution has hard-wired human beings to fail in the markets. Fear, greed, and other destructive emotions harass us into making poor decisions.Most trading teachers will tell you to “run your winners and cut your losses early,” and “banish fear and greed if you want to succeed.” Great advice, but let’s face it, it’s about as useful as saying “if you want to quit smoking, stop putting cigarettes in your mouth”. If only it was that easy!Anyone who trades knows it can be hard to take a loss or to run a winner. That’s because your brain is actively working against you when you trade. Fear and greed are two of its biggest weapons, and it won’t hesitate to deploy them against your best efforts to turn a profit.But what would happen if, instead of hampering your trading, your fear and greed worked for you? What if you could harness their power and energy and use them for good? Trading would become stress-free, and bigger profits would follow.In this groundbreaking new book, Harvey Walsh goes further than ever before in deconstructing the evolutionary developments and learned behaviours that have programmed us for failure in the markets. Armed with that information, he has developed a series of brain hacks - simple yet powerful tricks and techniques anyone can use to turn around their built-in disadvantages and use them to supercharge their trading.Here’s just some of what you’ll discover when you read Brain Hacks For to make your trading stress-free by subverting your fear-engine.Ingenious brain hacks to boost your performance and profit by commandeering your inbuilt cognitive biases and heuristics.How to harness the awesome power of addiction and have it improve every single trade you take.A simple but smart tactic that will trick your mind into revealing what’s really on a chart.What a racing driver’s pants can teach us about human fallibility, and how that same weakness can become our saviour.How to slay the monsters that haunt every trader, and build an impenetrable shield against self-doubt.The one document every trader needs to improve their entry selection exponentially.What cheat-heuristics are, why they’re good for you, and how to use them ethically.How trading less can mean you make more money.Five different ways to beat the boredom and keep yourself focussed. You can’t profit from a trade you missed, so make sure you don’t miss any.Brain Hacks For Traders is perfect for traders working in any market and any time frame. Scalpers, day traders, and swing traders will all benefit. The techniques in the book apply to any instrument too, be it stocks, futures, forex, options, or commodities. Give yourself an hack your brain and take your trading and your profits to the next level. Because trading needn’t be tough.

196 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 30, 2015

Reviews

[Alberto · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's really nothing new in terms of contents to this book, rather it makes a handy compilation of tools that are recognised, to varying degrees, to be helpful in trading.

The author explains how cognitive biases arose in the context of human evolution and helped us survive, and then shows how they can prove harmful in trading. He then proposes a way to hack them to our advantage.

The most powerful "hacks" discussed are: meditation and gamification, together with a host of other quick fixes to subvert biases, like flipping charts and productiviy tips like pomodoro and tools to block distractions.

Bear in mind that whilst the author is a professional trader, he clearly is not a professional writer. His writing style is adequate thoguh far from effervescent. The book also lacks an appendix with sources for its material (mainly pulled from David Kahneman and Nassim Taleb, anyway). This book is written for a specific audience that is probably already acquainted with these works.

[Dean De Villiers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book for established traders who want to iron out a few psychological flaws that could be hindering performance!

[Sandro Trosso · Rating 3 out of 5]

To the point practical hacks that address trading needs.

[Benjamin Barch · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is now my favorite book on the mindset for trading!

[Vitali Voughan Vazquez · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not the usual "textbook, technical analysis, boring" trading book that we traders have become accustomed to reading.

Your mind is your greatest enemy and Harvey explains in great detail why. Why do you doubt your trading. Why didn't you take that trade? Why aren't you following your trading plan?

Harvey offers some "hacks" throughout the book but to me it wasn't so much the hacks that helped me. It was more of learning and understanding that I have these problems and to acknowledge that I need to fix them.

Very helpful book, but I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone new to trading. New traders haven't yet felt there hearts get ripped out when they lose their accounts or get mad at the market when all their stop losses have been hit. And that's what this book helps us deal with and even fix it or as Harvey calls it, "Hack it."