It’s my belief that the ultimate psychological block in trading is the ability to consistently follow a set of rules for a long period of time. If you can do this, then you have the Trading Psychology part mastered (as this would also take care of the Fear and Greed aspects).

For some reason, I personally find this simple task outrageously difficult to accomplish. I can see that there are two things that cause this, which are what you might call GOAL DECAY (I just invented that term) and NEW DATA.

GOAL DECAY is when you set your goal on Monday, and it feels meaningful and purpose driven, but by Friday you’ve lost the plot. It seems stupid, pointless, wrong etc. Or else you just plain forgot… Your trading goals start off with energy, but then the energy quickly dissipates and the goal loses force. At this point you are ripe for the second issue:

NEW DATA – Once your previous goal has decayed, your then happen upon or else purposefully go looking for NEW DATA. This new data can also spring up from within your own mind as some great new idea and you set a new goal.

Then this cycle repeats. Somehow going around and around on this Ferris Wheel has to come to an end and some clearly defined goals need to be set. I guess in my previous post I alluded to this in terms of ‘sorting out’ all of the information and techniques I have acquired.