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Emotions as Information for Traders

  
  Education
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Start with a premise: Suppose you were empathic and could experience the emotions of the trading crowd.

You could feel their fear.
You could sense their greed.
What they felt, you felt.
If that premise were true, then emotion would not be something you would fight, ignore, or minimize.
Nor would emotion be something you’d blindly follow.
For the empath, emotion would be information: valuable information. It would be an indicator no less than market price or volume.
How would it change your trading to view every trading emotion as information to be scrutinized? How would it change your experience of your trading? 
Amazing what a difference a premise can make.

Three Steps In Overcoming Trading Fears

  
  Education
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1)  Slow Down – That fight or flight response speeds us up.  Under the influence of an adrenaline rush, our thoughts race, our bodies tense, and blood flows shift to the motor areas of our brains.  When we sit still, breathe deeply and slowly, and focus our attention, we slow down the body’s fight or fight responses.  Cooling down when events heat up is a great way to stay mindful and planned.  The best way to cool panicky feelings is to keep the body in a chilled state incompatible with those feelings.

2) Treat Emotions As Information – Your emotions are either telling you about a genuine threat in the world or a perceived one.  The key is sorting those two out.  If you can stay mindful and use the emotion to trigger an analysis of the situation, you can either appropriately act on the threat or remind yourself that your reaction is more to the past than the present.  When you treat emotions as information, you go into information processing mode, not blind action mode.

3)  Rehearse To Perfection – Too often we step onto life’s stage without proper rehearsal.  Any situation that generates a threat response can be mentally rehearsed through vivid visualization.  If we can keep ourselves chilled when we imagine stressful situations and visualize ourselves acting constructively, we create new mind-body connections that eventually carry over to real life.  If you conquer a fear 20 times in vivid mental rehearsals, it’s much harder to overreact to the 21st situation that occurs in real life.

4 Steps to Changing Your Bad Trading Habits

  
  Education
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1. Understand the benefit of change. First, ask yourself if you need to change. Then, ask yourself what you need to change. Identify your current habits and ponder the benefits of changing them. Perhaps while trading you are feeling negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, temptation, or frustration. And ultimately, these emotions cause you to make poor, impulsive and self-destructive decisions. Write down what would happen if you were no longer feeling such negative emotions. That is, what would happen if you were able to remain calm and clear-headed while trading?

2. Dissect the proposed change and benefits. Find as many holes in the prospective change as you can. Don’t just convince yourself that things will become better if you change. Make sure the grass actually is greener on the other side of the fence. Be clear about what you want to change and how you will go about it. Write down the benefits that will take place if you do indeed change.

3. Recognize the situation that triggers your self-destructive action. Write down those all-too-familiar conditions, or circumstances, that lend themselves to activating negativity within you (e.g., all the things done, or said, that push your buttons). Also, write down how you are going to consciously recognize them during the day as they happen. Now, next to each item, write down what systems and processes you will implement to avoid letting that situation become emotional. (more…)

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