Didn't see a thread on this topic. It was a point of focus/interest for me a while back. I will leave a few articles I found interesting here. Others can feel free to add links and docs.

This one hit home for me. Spelling bee participants practice for their contests in a couple ways. The study breaks it into three: 1) deliberate practice, 2) being quizzed, 3) leisurely activities (like reading lots). Study found strong link between those that practiced in solitary, feed-back driven etended to do better in the bees.

For me deliberate practice would be screen time, logging trades, and trade reviews. Flipping through charts might be like "being quized", but I found I spent too much time watching videos and reading forums "leisurely" trading activities. The leisurely activities became my procrastination. Need to move away from that.

This is one of the "grand-daddy" papers on the topic. Morse code, violin, piano, chess, athletics. Too many ideas for me to summarize easily. But worth the read.

Golf and chess here. Talks about the importance of focusing on metrics that you have control over. Plateaus can be maintained for years.

Here is an interesting example how a goalie practices: using a smaller than normal target (tennis ball), forcing situational awareness (ball overhead), throwing the ball to unseen targets. In someways more demanding than the situation he is training for, but developing skills needed.

Good idea for a thread. I would like to see this topic explored further.

As a long time competitive golfer I understand how deliberate practice can be applied towards improvement. I know that there are specific things I can work on to improve my ball striking, putting, chipping, etc. These things tend to be fundamental and time tested. You either do it right or not right, and the results show.

I have never figured out a specific way to practice trading though. There are a thousand and one different ways to trade, and the markets are ever changing. What worked today may not work tomorrow. I can read a golf book that says that if you do this, this, and this you have a good chance of hitting the ball straight. So I grab a bucket of balls and have at it. Repetition, repetition, repetition. The better I do those things the straighter I hit it, and then I move on to the next thing.

What is the equivalent to this type of practice in trading? How does a novice trader practice what he doesn't know? Is it just about more screen time?

I would love to hear some examples of how other traders practice.

Awesome! Thanks for all the above

Don't mean to burst your bubble, but have you guys read the meta-analysis from Macnamara et al. (2014)?

Quoting 

Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis Abstract More than 20 years ago, researchers proposed that individual differences in performance in such domains as music, sports, and games largely reflect individual differences in amount of deliberate practice, which was defined as engagement in structured activities created specifically to improve performance in a domain. This view is a frequent topic of popular science writing—but is it supported by empirical evidence? To answer this question, we conducted a meta-analysis covering all major domains in which deliberate practice has been investigated. We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.

(bold added)

They make a few comments that are essential for traders, I believe:

Quoting 

In terms of percentage of variance in performance explained, the effect of deliberate practice was strong for games (26%), music (21%), and sports (18%), and much weaker for education (4%) and professions (< 1% and not statistically significant). Why were the effect sizes for education and professions so much smaller? One possibility is that deliberate practice is less well defined in these domains. It could also be that in some of the studies, participants differed in amount of prestudy expertise (e.g., amount of domain knowledge before taking an academic course or accepting a job) and thus in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to achieve a given level of performance. Moderator analyses further revealed that the effect of deliberate practice on performance tended to be larger for activities that are highly predictable (e.g., running) than for activities that are less predictable (e.g., handling an aviation emergency), as we hypothesized. Furthermore, the effect of deliberate practice on performance was stronger for studies that used retrospective methods to elicit estimates of deliberate practice than for those that used a log method. In fact, for studies using the log method, which presumably yields more valid estimates than retrospective methods do, deliberate practice accounted for only 5% of the variance in performance.

(p. 1615-1616; underline added)

Their conclusion can be summed up with the following quote:

Quoting 

More than 20 years ago, Ericsson et al. (1993) argued that “individual differences in ultimate performance can largely be accounted for by differential amounts of past and current levels of practice” (p. 392). Ericsson and Moxley (2012) reiterated this claim, stating that “the concept of deliberate practice can account for the large individual differences between experts and novices” (p. 145). The results of this meta-analysis do not support these strong claims. Regardless of domain, a large amount of variance in performance is not explained by deliberate practice and is potentially explainable by other factors. We conclude that amount of deliberate practice—although unquestionably important as a predictor of individual differences in performance from both a statistical and a practical perspective—is not as important as Ericsson and his colleagues have argued.

(p. 1615)

Jura 

Don't mean to burst your bubble, but have you guys read the meta-analysis from Macnamara et al. (2014)?

What bubble does this study burst?