Archives of “emotions” tag

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Unavoidable Disappointment

  
  Education
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If you’re trading for emotional satisfaction, you’re bound to have lots of problems and continue to struggle, for two reasons. First, often that what feels good is often the wrong thing to do. Second, the game of trading, and it is a game in many respects, involves being disappointed fairly often.

Even for profitable traders a certain number of trades will lose money, and even the winners don’t always work perfectly or match your exact expectations.

As a trader, it’s impossible to avoid disappointment, not every trade is going to work. You get stopped out and then see the trade go on to work without you, or you hesitate and miss the move, or you exit early to book profits and watch the move continue without you.  When you think about it, trading involves a lot of disappointment. I cannot think of any other job that involves disappointment on such a regular basis. Even the most successful traders experience this. No way to escape it.

When you experience a lot of disappointment you’re going to experience a high degree of stress. And when stress overwhelms you…and by the way, stress can masquerade as performance anxiety or pressure to succeed, the emotional part of your brain will run right over the logical analytical part of your brain.  You’ll know when that happens because that’s when your rules go out the window or you veer from your plan and you take a revenge trade or an impulse trade or you freeze up and hesitate. (more…)

Embracing Your Obstacles

  
  Education
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There will always be people in life who envy you, who resent your success, who are threatened by your accomplishments, who do what they can to sabotage your efforts.
Those include people in a workplace who place politics and “optics” over productivity and innovation.  Those also include naysayers who don’t dare admit the possibility of achievement because that would undermine their excuses, their failure to make a difference.
You know who your friends are when you reach a breakthrough success.  Your friends are ready to celebrate with you: they share your joy.  Those who cannot celebrate with you?  Perhaps they’re struggling with their own demons.  Perhaps they are burned out and exhausted.  That doesn’t necessarily make them horrible people.  They just can’t be your friends. (more…)

G. C. Selden Trading Psychology – Hunches And Gut Feelings

  
  Education
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Recently most traders probably have spent a great deal of time managing risk and emotions. I know I have. When it comes to correctly gauging and dealing with emotions it is paramount to analyze your reactions in a detached way. The best way to get objective insight is to imagine taking a step back and then ‘watching yourself.’ It’s as if you were your own mentor or trading coach. This is not an easy task. Good results require emotional detachment, a lot of experience and the ability to honestly assess the degree of trading proficiency you have attained. Ultimately it will tell you what those gut feelings you are occasionally experiencing really are worth. That’s exactly what G.C. Selden addresses at the end of his classic trading book : ‘Psychology of the Stock Market’ which was first published in 1912. Here’s an excerpt dealing with ‘hunches and gut feelings.’ Lots of additional and valuable insight for traders is provided. Enjoy!

 

An exaggerated example of “getting a notion” is seen in the so-called “hunch.” This term appears to mean, when it means anything, a sort of sudden welling up of instinct so strong as to induce the trader to follow it regardless of reason. In many cases, the “hunch” is nothing more than a strong impulse.

Almost any business man will say at times, “I have a feeling that we ought not to do this,” or “Somehow I don’t like that proposition,” without being able to explain clearly the grounds for his opposition. Likewise the “hunch” of a man who has watched the stock market for half a lifetime may not be without value. In such a case it doubtless represents an accumulation of small indications, each so trifling or so evasive that the trader cannot clearly marshal and review them even in his own mind. (more…)

Do You Trade The Market or Your Emotions?

  
  Education
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As traders try to improve performance, the one piece of knowledge that is often overlooked, is self-knowledge. Most traders would benefit by simply focusing on doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t, which sounds obvious, but the reality is that most do just the opposite. Learning to identify which behaviors work and which don’t is not as fun or interesting as learning a new trading strategy or set-up.; and awareness of one’s internal state is just as critical, but that is typically not dealt with.  As a result, most traders focus outward and ignore their inner process. And the way this often plays out for a trader is they trade their emotions and not the market.

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.

Happy Diwali

  
Analysis, Education
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Happy Diwali & Happy New Year Dear Subscribers & Our Readers, We wish U great Diwali & Great Coming New Year.

  1. Quit letting trades go through your original stop loss, you were wrong, get out. When you start hoping and stop managing your stops you are losing money.
  2. Quit over trading, only take the very best entries and trade the very best stocks in your system.
  3. Quit making up stories about why you decided to hold your position instead of taking your stop when it was hit. trade your plan.
  4. Stop trading your opinions and start trading what the price action is saying.
  5. Stop following people in social media that cause you to trade badly and lose money.
  6. Stop looking at BLUE Channels  for trading and investing advice.
  7. Stop trading so big that you emotions are more involved in your trades than your mind.
  8. Disconnect your ego from your trading. You determine your risk size and entry the market chooses whether you win or lose.
  9. Quit riding an emotional roller coaster, your emotions should stay level when winning and losing. If not trade smaller.
  10. Quit buying falling knives and shorting rocket stocks, wait for confirmation and reversal before entering.
    Technically Your’s

    AnirudhSethiReport-Team/Baroda/India

So – you want to be a trader?

  
Analysis, Education, Life
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Trader-ASR

• In 1973 Larry Williams published a book titled “How I Made One Million Dollars Last Year Trading Commodities” detailing his trading success that year. The next year he lost the million dollars.

• Michael Marcus started with $30,000, borrowed another $20,000 from his mother and then proceeded to lose 84% of their combined capital (imagine trying explain that to your Mom) before becoming a successful trader.

• In 1987 several commodity funds managed by Richard Dennis lost 50% of their capital and were forced to stop trading.

It is the most competitive field out there, not only we have to fight each other (yes – this is what we do), but we have to oppose enormous computing power of heartless machines turning trades in nanoseconds. 

Here is a simple test if you cut to be a trader – if you can stay emotions free when you finish it – try stock betting…just don’t bet your house on it – that was a job of banksters. (Just remember – 99% of you will be better of sticking with just a test and not moving to real trading)

 Step 1. Go to your bank on a windy day.
Step 2. Withdraw a minimum of  Rs10,0000 in cash.
Step 3. Walk outside and with both hands starting throwing your money up into the air.
Step 4. After all of the money has blown away, go home and sit down in your favorite chair and calmly say, “Gosh that was foolish. I wish I hadn’t done that.”
Step 5. Get on with your life.

Learning from mistakes and moving on

  
  Education
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A Subscriber of mine asks me the following question …

“When should a trader know when to say it is enough and I need to get out of the position. More importantly, how do you find a balance between learning from a mistake and not being weighed down by it on your next trading decision.”

Here was my advice:

* if you have “edge” in a trade, then winning or losing on a trade will be determined long before you find out the outcome (profit/loss) on the trade.

* important to focus on the process of the trade… making ONLY high quality trades

* your job as a trader is not to determine or decide how much you make or lose…that is up to the market. Your job is to put on trades with “edge.”

as far as not being weighed down by the mistakes, my suggestion is to begin a “lessons learned” spreadsheet where you document mistakes you make and the lesson you learned from it.

I also suggest you start a qualitative trading journal that way you can get the emotions out of your head and onto the paper.

this will help you move past your barriers and get some closure on them so you can be focused on the next trade.

Stoploss for Traders

  
  Education
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There’s an old joke about the investor who never used any stop losses. His friend knew his big positions were getting crushed.

Out of concern, the friend asked, “How are you sleeping?”

“Like a baby” he answered.

“Really? You aren’t nervous or upset?”

“I sleep like a baby” he repeated.

“That’s amazing. I’d never be able to sleep through the night with those types of losses.”

“Who said anything about sleeping through the night? I said I slept like a baby: I wake up every two hours, wet myself and cry for 30 minutes before falling back to sleep.”

That’s why risk management is so critical: to save you from sleeping like a baby, and in the long run to save you a lot of money.

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There’s a reason flight attendants show you where the emergency exits are before takeoff. The same thinking should apply to investors. Prudent investors have a sell strategy in place before they get involved with a stock. Using any of these stop strategies helps keep your emotions out of the process when an investing emergency arises.

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