How do intelligent taders OVERCOME emotion?

It will come to you after some time, when you will lose some money and the win some money. It’s just experience I think, you will understand that you can’t always win and you will be able to handle your emotions.

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Try to use your emotions for benefits. If you are calm and can stay long at one emotional level, so trade long-terms, if you are so impulsive, trade like scalp or day term. We are just humans and we are different, don’t try to change your emotional background.

I am not sure whether impulsiveness is necessarily a good trait when doing any kind of trading, including scalping.

What I do is to avoid trading too often …space out my trades to avoid impact of emotions on my results

As you can see below, on average I trade 5 to 7 times per month…

This helps to minimize the effect of emotions of winning trades (euphoria, arrogance) or losiing trades (anger, revenge seeking) on your objectivity.

So for example, so far for February, just 2 trades have been made with the last one a 100 Pip gain on the GBP JPY on Monday during the market sell off…

Now this kind of gain in just 5 hrs could easily tempt me to greedily go after more pips even when it is not viable to do so. But because my type of trades arise just 1 to 2 times a week, I can easily come down from that high to calmy wait for the next trade.

Emotions canbot be avoided but by spacing out your trades, you can ninimize its effects on your trading results.

Duane
DRFXTRADING

I think the difference between a normal reaction and hysterics is only in your head. That’s why you have to just appropriately analyse your trade and success will come unto you )

The difference is also in the consequences of those two reactions, I think.

I help myself with declarations :slight_smile:

They go like that …

I am an inteligent trader.
I know the rules to make money.
I follow the rules to make money. etc.

I have a trading plan, I stick to it and I ALWAYS have a STOP LOSS. So I know how much am I willing to LOSE and if I do I do not panic.

IT IS ALL ABOUT EMOTIONS AND MINDSET.

Good luck!

1 you got to develop your strategy a belief system

2 you got to prove your strategy you got to master your strategy

3 after proving it consistently, you gain conviction, you feel enough certainty & confidence from it.

4 so now you got a belief system something which works>>> traders only fear, full of grief & anxiety,

cos they can’t create and evolve a profitably strategy, but once your strategy is good it comes along wit confidence & peace automatically…

Real intelligence is shown in your trading results. This quality develops in traders after doing many experiments, as they suffer with loss with many reasons and one of them is very common as emotional involvement. They have to do conscious steps to control emotions in trading.

can i see the checklist ?? I need some guidance in trading rn. going crazy !!!

@ZacKing What are your main challenges and obstacles when it comes to Trading Psychology?

Settle in on your objectives which means what kind of a trader one wants to be. Short term,long term,fundamental or technical,trading with the trend or counter trend. So each trader should plan what time frame they want to follow,their objectives and then you can build a trading plan around that. Use pre determined exit and entry signals,risk management,avoid over trading.

Such traders keep working on their trading skills and never let unrealistic plans affect their decisions. Every move they make is guided by intense study and research. They never trade with the hit and trial approach in mind because that is what lets emotions come in the way. Intelligent traders always go by a trading plan and sticking to that plan is the key to their success.

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You don’t overcome emotion. It’s normal to have emotions because we are human.
In the end learn to be aware of these emotions and learn to accept them.

i agree, emotions is what makes us human. all you need to do is learn how to not let them overpower your decisions.

Make your decisions before you find the trade. Know what you’re going to look for before you open the chart. Know where you will get in, the position size, where you will set your stop-loss, your exit criteria and your capital risk. Do these things when the market is closed and there is no emotion.

After that, follow your rules on automatic pilot.

You need to categorize which emotions are experienced in which moments. That way you can deal with them more effectively. I found Jared Tendler’s book, The Mental Game of Poker to be very well thought out and helpful.

I struggle with issues around losses. More specifically I struggle with risk aversion. You need to be very specific about what the problem is.
How does it impact my trading? I tend to close trades too early because of some price action I see in the consolidation which makes me doubt my position. Then I realize I was being silly and get back in, typically it works out. But this is costly. At first glance it is a bit impulsive, but the reasonining behind it is deeper. I’m trying to avoid taking a 1R loss. If I get out by myself, I don’t think of it as a loss. Even though it really still is. It’s an error trade.
The other manifestation of this is that I move my stops closer to the price after it has gone in my favour.
I’m very much against the idea of moving a trade to breakeven, because the market really doesn’t care about your position. Also there is no breakeven trade, you’re still risking whatever is in open profit.
I move the stop closer because I figure it shouldn’t return to that level if my trade is correct.
The reality is that typically the market is consolidating and my timing is rarely going to be 100% on a trade move. So I’m going to get chopped out. So why do I keep doing this? I’m trying to avoid taking a loss.

The key is as Mark Douglas so wonderfully put it. You must accept the risk on a trade, being willing to lose. Only then can you start to turn a profit. You have to put a specific amount of money up as risk on each trade and be willing to lose that money. Otherwise all manner of things can come out of the dark and affect your trading in ways that the less self aware will never see clearly.
Van Tharp’s Definitive Guide to Position Sizing has a very interesting piece in it where he discusses with a trader how much percent return they want. The trader says some large number, Van Tharp says that’s achievable, if he’s willing to live with 30% drawdowns (some large number, not sure the exact figure)
The trader says that’s too much. Van Tharp asks, how much are you willing to risk to make those kinds of returns? Trader says some much lower number. Van Tharp basically points out that the expectations and what it will take to get there are often out of whack because people don’t understand position sizing and the kinds of drawdowns that can occur.
The reality is that we get really messed up after large drawdowns, it makes trading much more difficult. It needs to be a seamless process where we can abandon a trade and move on to the next without too much trouble. Flexibility.

Only when you’re risking an amount that is not going to bother you (or affect your ability to trade) if you lose it will you be able to think clearly. There will always be emotions, you just want to avoid the elevated emotional extremes.
If you start approaching those levels, take a break. Or revisit The Mental Game of Poker to see how to handle things before they get so bad. The Hour Between the Dog and the Wolf has great information on this as well.

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Interesting thread. Emotion should not be blamed unless one followed TP/SL plan based on technical analysis (proper risk planned). If emotion sparks out, it’s a sign that shows your risk is out of boundary line. :red_circle:

It is not always possible to suppress your emotion but it can be overcome if one is trading with the right mindset. Mindset precedes everything else because this is what you bring to the game. Whether you have it or not, you can always work on that.

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I agree with what you said. But doing that isn’t easy then. Emotions do overpower our decisions while trading.