Here are 5 ways I will help you improve your trading...starting now

What roles does a psychologist play when working for a professional trading firm?  Here are a few of the ones I've filled during the past year:

1. Counselor - Sometimes personal problems interfere with trading and the concentration needed to focus on the markets.  In my counseling role, I help traders figure out what is going on in their personal lives and how they can change patterns of thought and behavior that are causing distress (and losing trades).
    
2. Stress Manager - When a trader has hundreds of contracts--or even more--on the line with a particular trade, the tension builds quickly.  As I like to point out, even if you're 60% correct in your market calls, for every 50 trades you make, you're almost certain to have a string of four consecutive losers.  That sets even the most experienced of traders on their heels.  Real-time techniques to handle loss and stress are essential to preventing expectable strings of losses from becoming snowballs.
    
3. Sounding Board - "What do you think of this market?" is a question I commonly hear.  Traders know I conduct my own research and look at longer-term patterns that they might have missed in their short-term focus.  By running their expectations by me and letting me play sounding board (and sometimes devil's advocate), traders are able to get outside their heads and--in Ayn Rand fashion--check their premises.
    
4. Educator - Many times a problem will appear at first to be a psychological issue, only to reveal itself as a problem with trading technique.  As an educator, my goal is to show traders new ways of reading and trading the markets that can address their shortcomings.
    
5. Coach - I recently explained in an article how I use journaling with metrics to help traders keep score and improve their performance.  My task as a coach is to help traders figure out, not only what they're doing wrong, but what they do that works.  Many times, there's a talented trader hidden inside the frustrated soul who is meeting with me.  Our job is to isolate that talent and make it more consistent.  

One of the real perks of working in a large professional firm is the ability to have someone who fills those roles on a full-time basis.  Most independent traders have to make do with self-help and networking with peers.  While I am not able to take on traders as private clients and students due to time constraints, I am willing to be a kind of consulting psychologist for TradingMarkets.com readers.  Do you have a counseling or stress issue you'd like to toss my way?  Would you like feedback from a sounding board, educator, or coach?  Email me at sonderstel@aol.com and ask the shrink.  I will select questions to address in my column and will do my best to respond by email to the remainder.  Feel free to keep your emails anonymous, and, for readers' benefit, please keep them brief and to-the-point.  Let's have some fun with this!

Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D. is Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY and author of The Psychology of Trading (Wiley, 2003). As Director of Trader Development for Kingstree Trading, LLC in Chicago, he has mentored numerous professional traders and coordinated a training program for traders. An active trader of the stock indexes, Brett utilizes statistically-based pattern recognition for intraday trading. Brett does not offer commercial services to traders, but maintains an archive of articles and a trading blog at www.brettsteenbarger.com.