Customer Reviews

Trading to Win: The Psychology of Mastering the Markets (Wiley Trading)

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

I have two copies of Trading to Win; one I lend to my traders, and one I keep for myself.

I have been involved in running a professional trading firm for the past three years. At first, there were only a handful of books to help an individual transition from active investing, to trading. These days, it seems, there is a new title introduced every few days. I look at the majority of these books, and few are worth reading from cover to cover.

Trading to Win is an exception. This book deals with the psychology of trading in a more thorough way than any book I've read. As insightful as Elder's Trading for a Living, with more detail on the psychology of winning, and a more updated perspective. Ari Kiev takes his readers through a step-by-step process, showing them how to build their personal psychologies and become "master traders". He compares trader training to the training of Olympic athletes in a way that is accurate and interesting to read. There are numerous questions and quizes in the book, designed to keep readers on track while creating their personal psychological strategies.

Bottom line: In order of importance, your average trader usually puts psychology far behind trading technique. If he worked more on understanding and developing the motivations that governed his trades, maybe he wouldn't be so average.

Buy the book and plan on reading it numerous times.

I bought this book expecting to gain some insights into the psychology of trading. I received one big insight: Don't just research the markets - research books about the markets before buying! Mr. Kiev entreats us to: "Find your weaknesses and eliminate them... Seek your psychological stumbling blocks and overcome them... Determine what restrains you from trading freely and well - and cast these things aside..." And so on -ad infinitum; ad nauseum. Step two - the next logical step - the "How" to do these things is not a part of this book. Perhaps the author will publish a sequel: "Ari Makes Even More Money." Please do not buy this book.

I am a professional day and swing trader. I didn't find this book to be particularly helpful because of the disorganized way in which it was written. Also it offers so many rules and guidelines that it is confusing to one as to which is more importnant. The author also tries to impress one with the profit size of his "students", throwing around figures like $20,000 to $30,000 in profits a day that his students or clients generate. I agree with another reviewer that these for the most part is meaningless as one needs to figure return on assets to really judge how well one is doing. I have read a much better book on trading psychology and this one really analyses why we make the mistakes so common in trading. Getting to the root of the problem has helped me to improve my trading. I am now in my third year in this business and hope to be in it for a lifetime.

If you've read any books on zen or books like the The Inner Game of Tennis and came away with a little something extra then this book will fit perfectly into your library of READ books. For me, it was really a book about trusting your yourself, your gut, trusting your feal and not getting sidetracked by the conscious brain, anxiety, down days, trusting the work you've put into something, understanding your anxiety, not running from your fears, but rather coddling them, and not letting them run your decision making process. Yes, it's a 'how to' for trading, but its also something a little more intelligent (useful for the real world too). By reading this book, you put your faith in Ari and his successful devotees such as Steve Cohen (forward) who have been incredibly successful in trusting their feal and you learn to trust yourself. Yes, some people have better feal than others. But, what trade to win tries to impress that will help you get closer to victory is that its the trusting yourself (not getting sidetracked), visualizing, taking calculated positions-not gambling, setting realistic/yet stretch goals that help you steadily build up your success rate (applicable really to anything, not just trading). Put it this way, I found so much of value in this book on trading, analysis, and life, that the book is totally marked up and I'm probably going to HAVE to buy another copy. Really worth while for amateur traders, pro traders, non-traders, portfolio managers and analysts alike, and anybody for that matter.

Way too general and vague to be useful. Any number of sources would be better even if one's main interest was the psychology of trading - for instance the articles in this field in "Technical Analysis of Stocks and Commodities Magazine". A better purchase bookwise would be either of Friedfirtig's books.

Dr. Kiev's book should be entitled:

"(Fill in the Blank) to Win".

One could substitute "Shopping", or "Collecting" or "Tennis" for the word "Trading" and this book wouldn't be very much different in its content or approach. It is reminscent of a plethora of self-psych courses one sees so intensly advertised on cable TV and in certain periodicals.

I don't mind motivational books. They can be quite helpful. As a trader who is considerably below the "$300,000 profit per month trader" Dr. Kiev so glibly uses as one of his examples, I found the book full of hackneyed cliches about successful attitudes overcoming all. In your dreams, maybe.

Ari Kiev's book Trading to Win might seem like just psycho-babble to some traders. That is odd, given that some of these same critics are devout followers of technical analysis, which premises that psychology factors firmly into market movements. Why then is it such heresy to believe that you can improve the performance of a trader by working on his psychology?

It is not a strange concept to Steve Cohen, who hired Ari Kiev as a "trading coach" for his hedge fund S.A.C. Kiev, who was profiled in Jack Schwager's Stock Market Wizards , teaches that traders need to stretch themselves in the goals they set. They also need to eliminate the negative thinking that prevents them from reaching those goals. Much of Trading to Win is thus actually "common sense" (as is most psychology, it seems), but sometimes it is useful to hear someone reiterate sound principles.

One principle for which critics have taken Kiev to task is his suggestion that traders should set or raise their profit goals, which seems like a veritable "no no" from a risk management perspective. The criticism misses the fact, however, that Kiev is really saying that raising your performance goals means raising your work ethic. What are you going to do to raise your game? Squeezing out extra percentage points of return requires getting onto the trading floor hours earlier (or hours later) than you normally would-and researching companies more assiduously on paper or by working the phones harder. Moreover, Kiev actually recommends stricter risk management through such time-tested techniques as understanding your reasons for each trade, as well as the setting of target entry and exit prices. He also wants you to figure out if fears and doubts are keeping you from cutting your losses and riding your winners.

This book is clearly not for everyone; it is easily too "touchy feely" for traders concerned solely with the quantitative or more tangible aspects of trading. Kiev also tends to float heavily from topic to topic, often without a clear path. But for those traders who wonder how "fixing their heads" might result in greater success, Trading to Win is definitely worth a read.

This book gave zero advice on trading. It is mainly written full of psychological advise (not bad) for someone who has poor emotional control. If this book is for you, you probably should see a psychiatist as well. For me, this was a total waste of my money buying it and my time reading it. If you have poor emotional control try it. If you are looking for practical advise on trading (as it's title suggests) you will not find it.

This book is about developing the right attitude and relaxing. It can be applied to almost any risk taking endeavor or competative profession.

The parts that profess to teach about trading per se are not useful. This book will not teach anybody anything about buying or selling financial products.

It repeats a lot of the same stuff over but the real message is to chill out and get serious about performance. Be a winner, examine your losers and why you went wrong and vow to change for the better. Again, have the right attitude and approach and learn to control stress with breathing exercises and muscle relaxation. To be a good trader, one must learn to endure stress and not react to it just to releive it but focus on the trade and do what is right based only on the objective analysis. This is hard to do because it is pleasurable to close out a trade and avoid the stress of being in it.

The book is useful in order to help one focus and work through stress. I imagine there are a number of self-help books that are similar in this regard. Nothing special.

The experiences, which served as the foundation of this book, are quite real and valid - judging based on my 14 years experience in trading. Equally valid is the author's LACK of ability to focus on, and deliver, his message. Mr. Kiev may be trained in psychology, but for certain not in trading the financial markets, nor in writing. The only useful reading appears to have been arrived at from his notes and quotes of his clients, otherwise this book is mumbo jumbo. You will have a hard time following the author's cluttered thought process and message. Some passages in this book lead me to visualize traders, seated in a circle, holding hands and chanting, while "clearing their minds" in a markets pre-opening ritual. I would pass on this book.