Krugman25: The Programmer

In my experience there are 2 major ways to reduce emotion in trading, and it will work very quickly. The first is to risk less of your account. Traders know they have a finite amount of money to trade with, and when you lose a large chunk of it quickly you know you just took one big step towards account ruin. As you risk more % of your account in single trades, you become more emotionally vested into those trades because now it isn’t just about making money but it’s about making sure your account doesn’t blow up. If you are use to risking 3-5% or more of your account per trade then drop it down to a more comfortable 0.5 -1%, and you will find that you are far less emotionally vested in your trade and each individual trade won’t feel like life or death. When your trades are so big that each one is life or death for your account it triggers the “fight or flight” emotionally response in your body and you will find yourself emotionally wore out from trading.

The second thing to help is to trade higher time frames. The more your are watching your trades and prices the more you are exposing your emotions to the market. By simply trading higher time frames you will be looking at the price charts less often and exposing your emotions to the Forex market less. You may need to just trade the daily or the weekly charts. The nice thing about trading these higher time frames is you have larger stoploss and profit targets, so you will not need to check on your trades very often(maybe once or twice a day for a few minutes).

If you lower your risk % and increase the time frames you are trading you will see enormous difference in how emotional you get while trading.

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