Reviews for The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes

The average rating for The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-07-21 00:00:00 Richard Peal This is a hard book to review because on the one hand it's not very good, but on the other hand were it a little better organized, a lot less repetitive, and were the sentences not so flat and grinding, one senses it could have been a trading classic. Its virtues are its sincerity, the sense that its author is immersed in thinking through the inner game of trading, and his willingness to risk hyperbole to convey his convictions. Goodreads reviewer Matthew Phann recorded a reaction that I recognized as my own: "Some people might think it's vague mumbo jumbo, and I agree it's somewhat vague, but interesting conceptually and probably approaches the truth." The way that I would describe its approach to truth would be to say that it's a book that proposes a useful mythology for the education of a trader. The pre-disciplined trader, in Mark Douglas's self-creation myth, is like the programmer-hacker Neo in the film The Matrix. At the beginning of the film he's immersed in a "dream world," but with the help of an experience of what Douglas calls "forced awareness" and a lot of deep reflection he is able(to use a favorite phrase of Douglas's) "to release himself from" the conventional, fake, herd world. Douglas describes his own liberation after going bankrupt as follows: "I started to appreciate my ability to think as my greatest asset...This sense of appreciation began to grow into a deeper level of understanding about the basic nature of my identity." Finally he realizes that "In the market environment...there is no beginning, middle, or end--only what you create in your own mind." In the "Final Note" Douglas explains the challenges of trading life once liberation occurs. Even after you have learned all of the skills set forth in this book, at some point in time it will probably occur to you that your trading is simply a feedback mechanism to tell you how much you like yourself in any given moment. After you have learned to trust yourself to always act in your best interests the only thing that will hold you back is your degree of self-valuation. That is, you will give yourself an amount of money that directly correspond with what you believe you deserve based on some value system you acquired at some point in your life. The more positive you feel about yourself, the more abundance that will naturally flow your way as a by-product of these positive feelings. So, in essence, to give yourself more money as a trader you need to identify, change or decharge anything in your mental environment that doesn't contribute to the highest degree of self-valuation that is possible. So there's a sample of his prose, as well as a vision of enlightenment and its fruits as set forth in The Disciplined Trader. To go back to The Matrix analogy, in Douglas's book the two worlds are called the "structured" and the "unstructured" world. The structured world is also called "the cultural environment." It's the world that includes other people. The unstructured world is of course "the market environment." It obeys no rules. It can do anything at any time. So...one has to make an informed guess about what it will do and cut losses when it contradicts one's guess. One will be tempted to hold onto one's position in denial that one was wrong and in the hope that the market will reverse and "make one whole." The virtue of virtues in an unstructured environment, as we have seen above, is said to be self-love, the more the better. The foundation for this self-love, though, is a kind of aversion to the ways of culture at large in favor of a privately acquired, hard-to-achieve mental independence which manifests itself as a cheerful confidence that harbors no fear. In society [i.e. "a structured environment"] we can get by and even be successful with a facade of confidence because people will generally support each other's illusions about themselves. The market, however, has no vested interest in supporting anyone's illusions about himself. If a trader is feeling fearful he can try to cover it up all he wants but his trading results will readily reflect his true feelings. The argument seems to be that the market is the truth, and if you can be without psychological damage that causes you to want to dissemble before your fellows then you can be the truth too and thereby make yourself congruent with the market--and know what it will do. It's a bold argument made in detail and while it's probably clear I think it's a little over the top I want to acknowledge, following Phan's remark, that in at least a mythological way the book probably gets something quite right. For someone interested in a library perusal I'd say The first eight chapters are better than the last nine. And finally: though I've never recommended The Disciplined Trader to a friend I would if I had any friends fully intent on following every possible clue that might help solve the mystery of a successful trader's self-formation.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-04-09 00:00:00 Colleen Gaffke The book was recommended by a trader I respect, however I find the writing so bad--repetitive, confusing, pointless sentences, actually, entire chapters that are gibberish--that I don't understand what the trader saw in this book. I find myself talking to the author saying "really, this is the best that you can do?". A friend told me that the entire book is captured in the last two chapters. I'm going to skip the rest of the books and see if he was right. In one of the reviews on this site someone said that (paraphrasing)if the writing were better this could have been a classic investment book. But God the writing is so bad! I'm sorry if the author reads this and it hurts his feelings because there is great information in here. But he either needs to spend more time writing it, get a better editor, or find someone to co-author it with.