FX TRADING PSYCHOLOGY
changes in their natural approach (the second of these is by far the hardest, especially if the behaviours are well ingrained).
Practical Strategy: Know Your Dark Side – Find the Force
“Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them. But do not let them master you.” Helen Keller
Go through the aforementioned list and identify your trading strengths. Now go through and identify your weaknesses – your dark side! – consider the frequency of which these events occur and the magnitude of them (the impact) and then rank them in order of priority to address.
What do you need to do to work on these?
You will find many of these dark side behaviours and their possible solutions in the rest of Part Two.
I know exactly what they and you mean when they say this, and it is not that they want to have no emotion at all. What they are really trying to articulate is that they want to have no ‘negative’ emotion – fear, anger, greed, etc.
Some states are conducive to peak performance trading and some are not. Some states hinder optimal trading performance from taking place. Trying to do something when you are not in the right state is like putting your foot on the accelerator when the car is not in gear – lots of revs, but you don’t go anywhere!
Ideal Trading State
I have heard many people say that they would like to trade with no emotion – would you? If you said yes, then hopefully I will persuade to change your mind!
Most people have heard of the phrase ‘being in the zone’ or ‘in the flow’. Tese are phrases that have been made popular by performance psychologists to describe people who are performing at their peak. When people achieve such states they will have accessed and be in their Ideal Performance State or, in trading terms, Ideal Trading State. Getting into your ITS is important because it enables you to fully access your trading talent and to perform to your maximum potential.
When I talk to traders about when they have traded at their very best – when they have had those peak moments – they typically describe them using words such as:
36 FX TRADER MAGAZINE April - June 2014
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