Trading in the Zone
Book

Trading in the Zone

Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline and a Winning Attitude

Mark Douglas
FT Prentice Hall, 2001

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Editorial Rating

7

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Recommendation

Mark Douglas compares a great trader to a world-class athlete: Both have honed their skills, reflexes, instincts and wills to a fine edge. Both have reached the point at  which a winning performance is an automatic, utterly unconscious process – that’s when they are operating in the zone. To reach the zone, Douglas contends, traders must impose mental self-discipline and adhere to a consistently strict system. Would-be investors and tyro traders will value this enlightening text for its underlying message that great traders are made, not born. 

Summary

Fundamental vs. Technical Analysis

As recently as the late 1970s, fundamental analysis was by far the dominant orthodoxy among professional traders. Fundamental analysis is about creating mathematical models that incorporate all the variables that might affect the supply-demand equation of any particular stock, commodity or financial instrument.

Technical analysis, which has always existed in one form or another, has come to dominate the thinking of professional traders for a good reason: Technical analysts make more money. Technical analysis is all about patterns and the ways traders interact with the market. Certain behavioral patterns are observable, quantifiable and predictable; therefore, they can be profitably exploited.

Mental Analysis

Within the framework of technical analysis is the realm of personal analysis. After all, if technical analysis were the ultimate solution, you’d expect to see everyone who uses it getting rich, but in fact the opposite is more nearly true. Traders, in general, lose. That’s a fact of the market. For every dollar made, a dollar is lost somewhere else. Every buyer is buying from a seller. When one trader...

About the Author

Mark Douglas is president of Trading Behavior Dynamics. He has developed programs and coached all levels of traders on how to achieve and sustain a successful trader’s mind-set. He is also the co-author of The Complete Trader and The Little Book of Trading Performance.

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