Trading & technical analysis
Trading to Win
1 min read
Dr.
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Dr. Arie Kiev, psychiatrist who worked with SAC Capital's Steve Cohen, applies elite sports performance psychology to trading. The book explains how the best traders manage stress, maintain focus under maximum pressure, set clear goals, and build the resilience to recover from losing streaks.
Our review
Dr. Arie Kiev was a psychiatrist at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center who worked directly with traders at SAC Capital, Steve Cohen's hedge fund and one of the most profitable of its era. «Trading to Win» (1998) applies elite sports performance psychology to trading: goal visualisation, development of the optimal mental state for execution, and management of confidence and loss-of-confidence cycles. Kiev argues that the best traders are not those with the sharpest technical analysis but those who can maintain a high-performance mental state consistently, recover quickly from losses, and execute their plan without emotional interference. The book is distinguished from other trading psychology texts by its genuine clinical foundation: Kiev is not speculating about psychological mechanisms but describing what he observed working with professional traders at the highest level. The limitation is that individual coaching of that calibre is inaccessible to most; the book translates part of that knowledge into principles that can be applied independently.
Who it's for
For professional or semi-professional traders who want to improve mental performance and execution consistency; less applicable in very early learning stages.
Key takeaways
- The high-performance mental state — flow, the execution zone — can be trained deliberately rather than simply waited for.
- The ability to recover quickly from a loss without letting it affect the next trade is a key differentiator of the professional trader.
- Visualising the execution process — not just the outcome — improves discipline at the moment of truth.
- Goals should be behavioural and measurable, not only financial: «execute the stop in all cases» is more actionable than «make X per month».
FactArie Kiev worked as a psychiatrist with the traders at SAC Capital, the hedge fund founded by Steve Cohen, and published «Trading to Win» in 1998.
