When I started my trading journey the psychology of trading was not a thing that crossed my mind. I skimmed through all the materials on the topic majorly because I thought I was of sound mind and would no way succumb to what typical traders would go through.

What is Psychology?

Wikipedia defines Psychology as the science of behavior and mind, including conscious and unconscious phenomena, as well as feeling and thought.

Why Should it interest a trader?

Simply because trading is a mind game.

The sole reason for taking a dive at understanding the psychology of trading is to gain an understanding to the underlying problems we face as traders and seek solutions; solutions that bring lasting change and results.

It had to take me over 5 good years of grinding and hitting bottom rock to realize that my mindset was skewed and would no way guarantee success.

It was at this point in my trading life and personal life that I had to reevaluate if this trading obsession was still a thing I wanted to keep at.

Trading like every other is not for everyone, figure that out fast and cheap.

The answer never took long to get to. Yes I had lost and lost a lot if not almost everything I had plus a lot more. Yes, I was flexible with my strategies and rules. Yes, there seemed no hope. Yes…everything was at odds of my succeeds…but, I still said, yes, this is something I want to do.

There are few things in this life that one will do tirelessly, day in day out year after year, set back and failure after another and still hang on. If you ever get one of those passions then that truly is a passion worth pursuing.

Loss after loss, failure after failure, call it stupidity, but, I was still as motivated as the first day I traded. That was something I could not take for granted.

Once I came to the decision to do this, I embarked on a journey to healing and renewing of the mind to succeed.

I honestly think this was not fun. In a twisted sense there is some kind satisfaction one gets from failure. Yet no one sets out seeking failure, but look through your society people seem to be comfortable with a mediocre life.

Trading is entirely a mind game.

Paul in his writings said be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

Our minds are the cradle of everything about our lives. How far high or low you go in the pursuit of any endeavor be it in health, spiritual, financial, emotional, name it, is all dependent on your mind.

Our actions are a direct result of how we think and view the stimulus causing that action. How we think and view these stimuli is a direct result of how and what we learned them, this learning could have been in school, upbringing, the people we relate with, et al.

Many embark on this journey with failure as a result guaranteed, that’s a hard truth, but it is the truth. Statistics prove that. WHY? Because we view trading at a superficial level.

A greater part of daily life is subconscious. Once you have learned something we almost never really think much about them. The subconscious mind takes over.

As I type this, I am not thinking what finger should press what key on the keyboard as compared to seeing me learn to play a guitar. The ability to type without looking at the keyboard has been ingrained in my subconscious over the years of typing. Same applies to every other activity you have mastered as driving, cooking, walking, playing an instrument, et al, the subconscious is more in charge

I often look at my trading journal and at times it never makes any sense why I took certain trades. It never makes sense why you have to re/move a stoploss when you know and have told yourself you should never do it.

It never makes sense, why you jump the rope and fail to wait for a perfect entry or exit signal, yet you don’t just know but are certain that patience pays.

When you analyze your trading, you will find many things you do that just don’t make sense.

WHY?

Because our minds are playing games on us. Mostly because we never got the right training – by training I mean training the mindset to work with us for our success.

Like me most traders struggle and attribute their failure to our strategies, so I did what every typical trader does, I developed a system and strategy that I knew gave me an edge. But that didn’t fix my loosing ways.

If you are new to trading or one who has struggled for some time now to see consistent results from your trading, I’ll bet like me the issues are deep seated in your mind, your psych.

And if you are to get anywhere close to profitability in the long term, you will have to do some thorough cleaning and rewiring of your mind.

And that’s the purpose of this website, nothing more than helping each one trader master themselves for success.

Let me be clear about one thing, I can not in anyway underscore the importance of a trading system or a trading strategy or rules, NO…, what I know from experience is that all these will jump fast out of the window when you sit behind a screen and money is on the line. You do not have to trust me on that, just look at your journal when you started trading or ask around.

You do not need to be a good trader to put a winning trade, just by the mere fact that there is a 50/50 chance that a trade will go either way means that every trading opportunity you take has an equal chance of giving you a winner or a looser, BUT you can never become a good trader who consistently books in profits if you have not mastered the psychology of trading.

You see trading is more of a mind game than strategies or plans or the holy grail or clicking the buy and sell buttons.

I hope I have picked your interest enough to devote time and yourself to understanding the workings of your mind as the only guaranteed path to the success you covet.

What next?

I and a select group will be writing and sharing resources and tools that we ourselves use to master our minds for success.

The easiest way to know when what material is available is subscribe to the newsletter or follow us on our Facebook and Twitter channels.

Feature Photo courtesy of meo from Pexels