High Performance Trading: 35 practical strategies and techniques to enhance your trading psychology

Steve Ward is a UK-based performance consultant and trading coach who was first exposed to the trading world in 2005.

Billed as a practical guide, this book is aimed at traders who are seeking to achieve and ultimately sustain high-performance trading. The book is divided into three parts, representing the same three areas of what Ward calls the ‘performance cycle’.

Part 1, Planning and preparing for trading success, looks at what it takes to ready yourself to become a successful trader. This includes not only developing the basic activities of trading (learning to place a trade), but also becoming a trader through personalising and developing your trading style. This evolution continues with the development of the skills and the ability to develop and execute trading strategies in line with your individual abilities, skills, strengths, and behavioural styles.

Part 2, Decision making, discipline and flawless execution, examines practical approaches for making more effective trading decisions and improving trader discipline in order to develop a committed and flawless approach with which to continually execute trades.

Part 3, Evaluation, analysis and improving and sustaining performance, discusses measuring and assessing your trading performance. Doing so provides feedback to help identify what traders need to do more of and less of; to identify things they need to start doing, and, importantly, things they need to stop doing! Techniques to improve performance and chance old behavioural patterns are elaborated.

‘High Performance Trading’ is aimed at those who wish to be very successful in their trading and who strive to be the best they can in all facets of their life. Through focusing on personal excellence, setting up for success (both at a practical hands-on level and at a deeper psychological level), and having a disciplined and structured approach to trading, both trading and personal success can be achieved. A key component is the ability to persist through good times and bad times. Reading this book should certainly help to achieve improvements in discipline and consistency and ultimately personal and trading success.