Our brain is hardwired to go into a fight or flight mode under stress, resulting in emotional responses like greed (taking too large risks), anger, fear (panic-closing) or fear of missing out. While this is a good thing when fighting lions in the savannah, it is a horrible thing when trading, and you need to make smart decisions and keep to your plan to keep making profits.
This topic will focus on how to get rid of emotions while trading, or at least make the best decisions which are not based on emotional responses of our ape brain. So how can we achieve that?
1 with good preparation
2 with checklists
3 with process orientation
4 with active emotional detachment
Good preparation:
If you watch a Football game or a Boxing match usually the team or player wins that has done the better preparation. The same goes with trading. Accumulate knowledge about the subjects of trading as much as possible. Start with small amounts and small leverages until you really know what you are doing. Be consistent, create good habits early on and keep them up. Make sure that you are mentally fit, live healthy, eat well, sleep enough and regularly, and exercise enough. Have a schedule. Track your preparation, track your results and analyse them. What were mistakes you could avoid in the future?
Checklists:
When things go down and away, it is always good to have a checklist. For example: surgeons usually have checklists that prevent them to go off the rails while performing a complicated procedure. Their checklists makes it absolutely clear in which order they need to perform what step, which frees up mental brain power for the actual process. So from your past make checklists what made your trades profitable and focus on those kind of trades that have done well in your past.
Process Orientation:
With the checklist, we should be able to make good trades more often than not. All we need to do now is focus our metal brain power on the process and not on the outcome. As we have built enough expertise and a checklist that we follow, we focus on rules and our discipline, not on the outcome of a single trade, because as we all know one trade can always be good or bad, independent of how well it was thought out.
Active emotional detachment:
There is something called Tilt in Poker. Some players will actively try to insult players after bad beats to make the go tilt, or "emotional". This will result in very bad decision making. Maybe you remember Zinedine Zidane in his very last World Cup Game, head butting the italian player and getting sent of the pitch with a red card. The worst possible outcome. TILT.
If you still feel like you get emotional about trades, there are a few things you can do: Lowering your margins, lowering your leverage, take a break, breathing exercises, watch your favorite series or listen to music. Get a little distance to your trades, before continuing. NEVER trade on TILT.
How are you dealing with your emotions? Anything to add or to take away from this?
I have generally experienced that whenever there is a trade in loss people get emotional and take other and large trade in panic, some people keep on increasing SL in hope of reversal which does not happen in many cases, one such trade can wipe out your account, profitable trades are good to accept whereas losing trade is hard to close, make a plan before taking a trade and always stick to that plan.
