How do you motivate yourself?

When looking back at the mistakes made and the money wasted, how do you keep yourself motivated for the coming week?

What do you tell yourself not to revenge?

What do you tell yourself not to overtrade?

What do you tell yourself to stick to the plan and keep the journal?

Do you have a routine you follow each morning to put you “in the zone” before start trading?

Do you hit hard your hands when you take a trade you are not suppose to take?

Thanks for sharing!

Alright I am going to have a shot at this. Some of these are going be pretty cliche ideas, but they resonate with me. Admittedly I have lost a lot of money myself, but I have also banked as well. That pendulum swings both was, our job is just to make it swing 1 direction a little bit harder than it swings the other to make it worth it. To be completely honest, I take losers pretty consistently. The answer lies in how you deal with it.

When looking back at the mistakes made and the money wasted, how do you keep yourself motivated for the coming week?

Lose the money, NEVER LOSE the lesson. Thats how ideal with the errors and mistakes. Journaling and screenshotting allows me to drill into my thick skull what to avoid. If I have to put effort into “keeping myself motivated” its probably time for a break or a vacation. You should not force this, it should be something enjoyable. If you are having to force this down your own throat, its just not enjoyable, you are probably not in the best state of mind, and you probably going to be able to learn and perform your A game.

What do you tell yourself not to revenge?
This is something I have gotten over. I haven’t taken a rule breaking trade in over 18 months. First of all I use this system called HALT. Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. If I am any one of those things its time to shut down and go do something else. IMHO you can’t control your emotions, we are human and they exist in our core. But what we CAN CONTROL is do we allow those emotions to have a tangible effect on the trade.

An example: A trade moves 50 pips in my favor, but it looks like its retracing hard back and I am fearful for my paper profits. My rules say I should move my stop to breakeven at 75 pips, do I just move my stop up anyway? NO of course not. its not your plan, moving it is allowing your emotions to have an effect on the trade. Honestly I miss targets by 1-2 pips, and they come back to BE or whatever. So what I executed my entry and exit perfectly, as planned before I entered the trade this is what my definition of discipline is.

What do you tell yourself not to overtrade?
Honestly, I don’t believe in over trading. There is no number of trades where trading becomes over trading. If there were 1000 trades a day that followed my rules, taking 1000 trades per day would be exactly how many trades you should take. There are scalpers out there doing exactly that for prop shops all day long for their entire career. If there are 0 trades that followed your rules today, then thats exactly how many trades you should take a big 0. its just lack of following your plan, period.

I have a poster on my wall in my office. It says your goal today is to execute every trade perfectly and according to my plan. Its really that simple, that is what discipline is. Following your homework, executing those trading ideas as you pre planned them out. Good trades are trades that follow that plan, Bad trades are trades that don’t follow your rules. Good and Bad has nothing to do with your P/L. Honestly I don’t even look at my P/L that often, its no where on my trading screens. I check my trade confirmations at the end of the day and get my P/L there.

Something that might make the mistakes more disgusting and make you want to avoid them as much as possible. Is write down how much each trade that broke your rules cost you, thats how i did it. The bigger that number got, the more disgusted and horrified I became. Eventually I figured, I would rather spend that money on something else as opposed to a bad trade. Then I stopped because I knew the actual cost of repeating that mistake.

Really
What do you tell yourself to stick to the plan and keep the journal?
Its routine at this point. I do my pre market prep while drinking my coffee, I do my mid day check in before I eat lunch, and I close out my day and do my daily review. its just part of it. if your struggling at this at first. Keep it to simple, eventually you can do more as you want to learn more about your trading. Key aspects you should have at minimum are:

  1. pre market prep and trading ideas (this is how you compare your actual executions against)
  2. Psychology ( i score myself 1-10 and write a small note on how I feel)
  3. each trade with reasons and screenshots
  4. review of the days trades after your done for the day.

Do you have a routine you follow each morning to put you “in the zone” before start trading?
I actually do the same thing every day. The premarket prep, is what gets me in the zone. But I actually like to stretch out before I sit down, and then just kind of focus. That 5 minutes is really the only “weird” thing I do.

Do you hit hard your hands when you take a trade you are not suppose to take?
I don’t know what that means. But like i said above, I mark down the mistake, i calculate how much I lost because of it. either in opportunity because I choked the trade, or realized because i took a stupid loser. as I realized how big it was, and how it kept growing. I just stopped. Look i do slip up I am not perfect its just they happen so infrequently nowadays. But I would pull up that spreadsheet and add that mistake there and probably just beat myself .

Thats just my personal feelings on the subject.

Hi Trasimaco

No 1 - I’ve been trying to make it in business (not this business) now for the best part of 20 years. To quote Kanye West ‘the hungers Ethiopian’. I don’t really struggle with motivation

No 2 - I did revenge trade for a little while, about a year, but realized it always ended in a loss

No 3 - Once you’ve burned yourself to crisp (which may take months if not years) over trading you’ll eventually realize expecting a good set up everyday isn’t very realistic and put the brakes on, and eventually, stop over trading

No 4 - Not enough traders have a plan OR keep a journal. Simply put, you will not be profitable over time if you do not stick to a plan. If you do not keep a journal it will be far more difficult to figure out what it is you are doing wrong

No 5 - Everyday i look for set ups. If there is a solid set up i take it. If not, I’m a spectator for the day

No 6 - I don’t take trades I’m not supposed to take. I stalk trades with the odds heavily stacked in my favor or i don’t enter. Sometimes they win, sometimes they loose

For me, it really comes down to the fact that this is what I was meant to do. If you honestly believe that, trading is really your calling, then you won’t do these things. If it isn’t for you, then find something you love and do that.

Hi guys,

Thanks for the answers!

My first 2 weeks trading live have been positive after all. However I made few mistakes and I aim to improve for the coming weeks. Mainly I have been over-trading but I guess it is just because I am new to this and I still have to adapt to trading and get self disciplined and self motivated.

Ok lets see what I can come up with,

When looking back at the mistakes made and the money wasted, how do you keep yourself motivated for the coming week?

At this point in my trading, week to week is not really something that I am focused on. I look forward to how and what I am doing from this point forward. There is no need to worry about the past. As long as you learned from it, it’s a good thing.

What do you tell yourself not to revenge?

When I first started, I used to get mad. Chase trades, trying to get revenge and all that. Now, again, there is no point. You can’t get mad. The truth is there is only 2 reasons why your trade failed.

1- You screwed up.

2- The trade just didn’t work.

Focus on what you did wrong and try to fix that.

What do you tell yourself not to overtrade?

You would have to define over trading. If you mean trying to find trades that are just not there, it takes experience to do that. The amount you trade is based on your trading method. Not "over trading " is do not trade if your method is not 100% telling you to. Do not try and change rules because you missed a good trade or had a bad one.

What do you tell yourself to stick to the plan and keep the journal?

That one is easy. I stick with my trading plan because it works. I know it works because I went through the proper stages of development.

1- Back test 48-60 months

2- Demo 3 months

3- Live trade small account 3 months

As with any business, you need to have a viable plan and a solid money management strategy.In business you start with a concept, develop it and test the market. You need to do the same thing. You do not see fortune 500 companies completely changing everything because they had a bad quarter. They may adjust or fine tune but they do not change what they do.

As for the journal , it is my favorite thing to do. I can look and see what happened, why it happened and what I can do to keep doing things that work or adjust what does not. If you do not keep a trading journal, even if your only in demo, you are cheating yourself out of knowledge that you have learned through your FX experience.

Do you have a routine you follow each morning to put you “in the zone” before start trading?

Nothing special. When I get up, check any trades that were open, adjust stops or close. Open any new trades that meet my conditions. Its just routine really. I do not really have a zone because I am always thinking about trading. Well Sunday night through Friday afternoon.

Do you hit hard your hands when you take a trade you are not suppose to take?

No, I do not make mistakes. Either a trade works or it does not

-ILZ

Finally another trader from San Francisco. Sup Hugh

i watch porn during trading. that´s what works for me

Hopefully you don’t watch charts during sex! :stuck_out_tongue:

A couple of interesting articles from babypips :

Developing Self-Discipline in Trading | Forex Blog: Pipsychology

Building Confidence to Maximize Winners | Forex Blog: Pipsychology

I think I will write down a few basic rules/reminders and stick them on my laptop screen. This should help me to stick to the plan, stay disciplined and motivated until I will reach the point where it will be just a routine as for the more expert traders!

Eric Thomas YouTube videos and reminding myself that if I get this stuff right my wife and kids live better!

hi,
we want to update for time to time market possition.because we want to tuch in market.which is we can growth in market .then we can motivate to our self.

I never view money lost and mistakes made as things “wasted”. They’re not wasted if you learn why they happened and work to correct them. Anybody that tries things will make mistakes. That’s one of the best ways that we learn. It is far worse to sit comfortably in one’s own niche and never step out of it, in my opinion.

I avoid revenge/overtrading through a comprehensive set of rules on when to trade and when not to trade. Before I click execute, I ensure that I am following my trading strategy/plan.

And I usually do have a period of cooling after a good or bad trade (I trade long time frames). Yes, when it happens, there is usually a stream of profanity and face palming. But at the end of the day, that trade is just one of thousands that I will end up making. I just remind myself that it’s not worth tying myself up in knots over.

I know what I want and how to get there. That is my biggest motivator.

I don’t really find it difficult to get in trading mood because I am already used to the system. Its annoying sometimes when I lose. All I do is walk away from my computer and go outside to get some fresh air. After some minutes, lets say 30 or even one hours, I’ll log back in and makeup for my mistakes. Its easy, I don’t have any psychological issues when trading.

That’s very good and shows you are on the right path.

“you got to lose to know how to win” - lyrics from legendary Aerosmith song Dream On

Punish yourself somehow for not following your rules and when you have done something right then spoil yourself a little. There is a lot of stuff written about this if you search the net.

I think the punish/reward system is not a bad approach for traders. I try to use it myself in order not to rush to certain trading aspects guided by fear and greed.

It is always good to have some sort of Motivation in Forex trading. This is also a need for those Forex traders who are making loss and would need a means to continue with their efforts for getting the success :slight_smile:

It is very difficult to motivate yourself when you are facing losses but there are some good motivational videos I tend to see and it worked out most of the time.