Trading with Anxiety

I’m curious to know if anyone else in the community has anxiety in their personal lives and trades regularly?

I’m new to the forum but have been trading pennies/small caps for a little over a year, and FX for about 1-2 months.

Sometimes the thought of trading makes my anxiety rise up a bit, or while I’m anxious, I don’t even want to look at charts. It comes from the uncertainty of the game. Dealing with uncertainty, and letting things go that are out of my control are some things I’m working on in my personal life. Ironic I trade right? Well I love it.

And then there are the times when I’m cool, calm, collected, I’ll trade smart and I’ll be relaxed and confident before and during a trade, and that’s when profits always seem to occur.

So, anyone else in this boat? :cool:

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I have been a victim of emotional trading from past five years and the sole reason because of which i have still not attained financial freedom. Only if one can control their emotion and think more practically will be able to survive and make money in this highly potential forex trading business.

The psychology in the human being is always up and down , its normal . we will anxiety when the real condition not same as our desire also and we wan’t that condition . so to be strong and steady is needed

In anxiety trader do not decide well he will try will loose his confidence. Emotional trading is not solution if traders think they can recover loss with revenge , anxiety steals our senses that help to do realistic trading. They should do trading in cool mind and relax situation.

It is very much essential for all the traders that they put away their emotions when they are trading in such highly profitable and highly risky market. Because only those who can apply their technicality will be the one to excel in this business.

LOL, I still experience trading anxiety. What I found:

  • reduce your risk per trade. I find 1% to be “optimal”. At 2% risk, a handful of losses will send me on tilt and steer me towards system-hopping etc. At 1%, I’m comfortable surrendering to the market.

  • have a stable alternative source of income.

  • stay away from live charts if you’re swing-trading. The longer I look at my live trades, the more opportunity I give myself to mess around with them and doubt myself.

  • strenuous backtesting. My overall trading method has thousands of backtested trades. This is no guarantee that I’ll make money, but there’s some comfort in knowing that my trading method made money for many years across many pairs.

  • kill the ego. Try to avoid showing off to other traders about your success. If you show off, your identity will begin to revolve around making successful calls ALL THE TIME, which is not possible. Trading is a probability game.

That’s all I have so far. :slight_smile:

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Very helpful notes and suggestions. The main part is that most of the traders are prone to show off their success to other traders and it hurts their own ego only to ruin their trading and this is the reason most of the traders who are successful may give poor performance after a while.

Hi Jessie

I have Anxiety from time to time, I’ve battled it at different levels for a fair while now. Weirdest bit about it is that I get anxious even when I’m doing well at trading, which I guess points at reasons for anxiety outside of my MT4 platform.

I agree with Kevin, these days I find it helps most to remove the care factor from my trading by mitigating risk and making sure I have a solid source of income and being reasonable with myself about how long it will take to gain that elusive financial freedom… that at least helps me to not get anxious about my open trades or even the thought of opening a trade.

I have little sticky notes all over the place with “next 1000 trades” written on them and constantly tell myself “the only losing trade is the trade I don’t take”. These things help me to remove the care factor and focus on improving my strategies and myself and get me closer to the holy grail of FOREX… Financial freedom.

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If we are looking for getting Long term success in this business then the best thing that we have to do is to protect our Trading Funds :slight_smile:

And only then we will be in a condition where we can see our performance improving :slight_smile:

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It is very good of you that you could learn or made it a good learning process for yourself due to the mistakes made and most of the traders only lose their money because of repeating their mistakes.

If you don’t want to make same mistake many times in a row, then you should prepare good trading plan and then you could prepare trading journal in order to make evaluation good and bad condition of market. With trading journal, traders can maximize profit and minimize loss with knowing the best time for trading and exit from trading. You can exploit profit in the most effective time for trading with current strategy.

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It’s normal when you feel anxieties when trading. Also, it comes bigger when you’re not even sure about your execution. My advice for this is to give yourself a break from forex trading. Overwhelmed mind may cause a reckless action in trading.

Anxiety affects confidence. If I do not trade confidently and with the belief I fail. 5 years of trading and every negative month has been a result of anxiety prior to the negative trades through my personal life. It can be hard to notice the anxiety in order to step away from trading for a period though. Learn to read the signs early and step away from trading when you feel them

Build your trading plan!
Anxiety may affects your confidence but you can tackle it with a proper analysis before execute an order.

It’s natural to feel some sort of anxiety when trading live, especially when there are plenty of uncertainties in the mix. It helps to remember that you’ve done your analysis and that you’re always in control of your risk.

Yes, but there should be a threshold for each and every thing and traders should ensure that they do not cross that threshold because of which it may be fatal for the account.

If a trader will make such type of trading mistake that his account gets a Margin call then it will mean more trouble for him.

We know that as a trader when we get a loss we get more impatient and restless and thus want to recover the losses with investing more funds, but i can say that this is what should not be done :frowning:

True at the verge of making or recovering money traders do not realize that they are actually losing their hard earned money, which if they would have managed patiently could have given them more money.

Personally, when I got a Margin Call, I always pull myself back to demo Account and see what was wrong from my trading system.