Last night when I heard the news from ZeroHedge, I tweeted (follow me on Twitter!) “Very sad day Dr. Ari Kiev died http://bit.ly/4y1mpW one of the greatest trading psychologists ever, see my video w/ him http://bit.ly/14Fn56 and understand Ari was not only a great trading coach but also a great guy…check out the video we did together on CNBC (the content of which is why I have never been asked back on CNBC….apparently my bright idea offended many of their $500 million/year in profits viewers)
(that was fun and I turned out to be dead on with Intuitive Surgical Inc. (ISRG), but I’m guessing Ari would prefer me showcasing this informative video of him teaching):
We weren’t very close (probly due to him being the trading coach for secretive/powerful SAC Capital and I being a loudmouth blogger) but we chatted and exchanged emails every now and then about trading and writing books/publishing…readers of my book “An American Hedge Fund” might remember the famous trading coach who makes an appearance at the beginning and end, that’s Ari!) and Ari’s books:
…are some of my favorite books on trading:
Here’s the NY Times obituary, a wise and helpful man has fallen, it is indeed a very sad day:
Ari Kiev, a psychiatrist whose early work on depression and suicide prevention led to a career helping athletes and Wall Street traders achieve peak performance, died Nov. 18 in Manhattan. He was 75 and lived in Park Ridge, N.J.
The cause was complications of cancer, his son Marshall said.
Dr. Kiev (pronounced Keeve) showed signs of intellectual restlessness early on. As a young psychiatrist he became intrigued by how other cultures dealt with mental problems. His interest in what he called “transcultural psychiatry” led him to seek out nontraditional practitioners in Africa and Asia, and to explore psychiatry in the Soviet Union.
These forays provided the material for one of his early books “Transcultural Psychiatry” (1972), and two essay collections that he edited, “Magic, Faith and Healing: Studies in Primitive Psychiatry Today” (1964) and “Psychiatry in the Communist World” (1968).
After specializing in depression and suicide prevention, work that often involved shoring up the self-reliance and assertiveness of patients, he became fascinated by the psychological barriers athletes encounter when trying to improve on their best performances.
He applied visualization and relaxation techniques to coax faster times out of rowers and bobsledders, while helping them recognize and face down their fear of failure.
His work with athletes caught the attention of Steven A. Cohen, the founder of the hedge fund SAC Capital Advisors, who hired Dr. Kiev in the early 1990s to coach his traders and help them deal with the stress and uncertainties of financial markets.
Dr. Kiev translated his Wall Street experiences into best-selling books on stock trading, notably “Trading to Win” (1998), “Trading in the Zone” (2001) and “Hedge Fund Masters” (2005).
Ari Nissan Kiev was born in the Bronx, the son of a rabbi, and grew up in Washington Heights. He attended Stuyvesant High School and graduated from Harvard in 1954 with a degree in social relations. After earning a medical degree in 1958 from Cornell Medical College and pursuing his psychiatric training at Johns Hopkins and at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital in London, he returned to Cornell to head its department of social psychiatry.
Dr. Kiev specialized in suicide-prevention research. At Cornell he founded and directed the Suicide Prevention Clinic, and in 1970 he founded the Social Psychiatry Research Institute in Manhattan to help develop antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs. The institute has been involved in clinical trials of Prozac, Zoloft and other drugs.
After meeting several Olympic athletes at a gym where his sons worked out in the 1970s, he became interested in the psychology of sports performance and was appointed to the United States Olympic Committee’s sports medicine committee. His work with basketball players, bobsledders, archers and scullers and his articles on the subject caught the attention of Mr. Cohen, who saw parallels between the challenges faced by top athletes and Wall Street traders and hired Mr. Kiev in 1992 to coach his employees.
Dr. Kiev helped traders develop techniques to shift abruptly from moments of extreme exertion to relaxation, as he had done with athletes, and to manage the stress that comes with uncertainty — or, rather the certainty that even good traders can expect to be right only a little more than half the time.
He also zeroed in on behavior patterns and subconscious fears that limited or even subverted investment goals. Part of his work, he often said, was to force traders to see their tendency toward denial and rationalization.
“An athlete who wants to run a four-minute mile can work backward and establish a regimen to attain that,” said Matt Grossman, who worked with Mr. Kiev at SAC and now runs his own hedge fund, Plural Investments. “Ari applied this concept to investing: set a target, then design an approach that gives you a high probability of achieving that target.”
Dr. Kiev’s boundless curiosity made him a perpetual student. After appearing often as an expert witness in court cases, he decided to go to law school to learn more about the legal system. He earned a degree from New York Law School in 1988. At his death he was working toward a master’s degree in executive health care at George Washington University.
In addition to his son Marshall, of Westport, Conn., Dr. Kiev is survived by his wife, Phyllis; another son, Jon, of Annapolis, Md.; and four grandchildren.
His book “The Mental Strategies of Top Traders” is scheduled to be published in December by Wiley.
Tags: Ari Kiev Hedge Fund Masters, Ari Kiev SAC Capital, Dr. Ari Kiev, Financial Obituaries, SAc Capital Trading Coach
