Traders have a major problem. After over two decades of trading on the floors in Chicago and San Francisco, building my own options and equity trading firm, training traders to trade my own capital, coaching traders, building trading courses, and facilitating online mastermind groups, it has become obvious that most traders have a major problem.
The path to trading mastery is often sabotaged by subconscious emotions we bring to the market. I have seen the subconscious emotions and desires cost big money, not only for myself, but the traders in my own firm. That doesn’t even start to add up the millions lost by other floor traders whose emotional biases have limited their profits.
As I work with independent traders, I see these Mind Traps preventing smart, experienced, and determined traders sabotaged by what they don’t know. And by that I mean what they don’t know about the subconscious emotional patterns in their brains that are preventing them from getting the success they want.
Our subconscious emotions are often connected to the deepest survival instincts in our brain. Some of these instincts come hardwired from our evolutionary past and their development in tribal cultures on the savannas of Africa. Other subconscious patterns we create all by ourselves when we were much younger as a way to survive challenging situations or even trauma as we grow.
These emotional Mind Traps are skilled at camouflage. No matter how good we get at seeing the market as it is without our biases, our Mind Traps will get even more creative.
As a result, many traders repeat the same trading behaviors. The repeated patterns reduce their potential profits, or even prevent them from becoming consistently profitable.
Do you recognize any of these trading patterns that no longer serve you?
[one_half_first]Making impulse trades
Missing good trades or afraid to pull the trigger
Over trading
Repeating the same errors
Stress
Fear of loss
Jumping from system to system
Lack of discipline
[/one_half_first]
[one_half_last]Doubling down
Need to be right
Feeling stuck
Fear of failure
Cutting winners shorts
Lack of confidence in your strategy
Ruled by emotion
Self-sabotage
Letting big losses run
[/one_half_last]
What if, imagine what if you could uncover these emotionally driven trading behaviors? By this I mean the patterns that are rooted the subconscious patterns in our brains. Imagine what if, you could stop fighting your own brain!
Can we change from internal struggle to an internal rapport that feels better and gets us to our goals? My three decades of trading experience along with training traders tells me that we can’t discipline ourselves out of these behaviors that we repeat over and over again. A more productive way to create new behaviors that serve us better is to become aware of the subconscious patterns, realize the positive intent from which they were created, and then build rapport with all parts of ourselves that contribute to our trading decisions.
How do we do this? This prescription is only helpful if we have a methodology of awareness and discovery that creates additional choices for ourselves in real time. However, we recognize this process that is the most challenging one we will face as traders. You see, our emotional desires are very skillful in pulling us back to our dream zone.
This isn’t bad: AND it is the life’s journey of an independent trader.
What can you do right now? If we can see this as part of our growth and part of our trading progress, we are now on the right path. I normally give an exercise at this point so you can play with this concept on your own. However, this is such a core issue, I am inviting myself over to “your place” to give you some support here. As a student of this process myself, coaching the traders in my firm and along with hundreds of Mind Muscles Academy members, I have seen how another pair of supportive eyes can make all the difference.