Anxious:  Am I prepared?  Can I afford to lose what I am risking?  Am I breaking my rules?  Did I drink too much caffeine?

Anger:  Have I not moved from the last trade?  Am I tired?  Is there conflict in my personal life?

Happiness:  Are psychological gains more important than monetary gain?  Am I overconfident?

Indifference:  Do I care?  Is something more important?

It is natural to feel emotion but in an appropriate and proportional way.

Anxious:

To this day, the first trade always produces a little anxiety.  That little tingle in your stomach and shallow breathing.  The same is true when I a trade I have been waiting for sets up.  Above that, I know there is something wrong.

Anger and Happiness:

I am angry after a negative outcome and happy after a positive outcome but in order to adapt more quickly I have to remove emotion from the outcome as soon as possible.  It is more important to focus on what happened and less how I feel about it. Prolonged feelings of anger or happiness causes risk blindness and impedes my learning.  Misjudging risk will prevent me from taking a trade or taking too much risk.

Indifference: 

I have already talked about the worst thing that can happen to a trader.  No emotion can be a warning sign too.  Emotions should not last forever but they should exist.

Emotional Delay

The other issue is emotional delay.  This plays out in two ways.  If I am exhausted after a trading day it is because I bottled it up and was able to repress it.  This happens when I made money doing things that aren’t repeatable, I found the natural winners before the losers.  I should have lost money.  The other occurs when I turned a good day into a bad day but it happened so fast I never reacted to it.

Conclusion

Emotions are an important feedback mechanism.  Always take inventory of who you are that day and who you are after each trade.  Just like every trade is not the same and you are not the same person every trade.  Once you find the right combination of evaluation and action you have to fight to keep it.

It is not important to perfect it right away just continue to move forward.  There will be set backs;  a new you, a new market, and a new interaction between the two.