Thursday, November 05, 2009

Trading and Mood

Special thanks to reader Adam for pointing out this excellent article on mood and its effect on leadership.

Why is this important? Because you are the leader of your own trading business.

As the article indicates, how we think affects how we feel--and that helps to shape our actions. Moods are contagious: we are less productive when we are mired in frustration and powerlessness.

Trader 1 loses money and doubles down on efforts to take away lessons for learning and improving trading. Trader 2 loses the same amount of money and uses the occasion to vent disgust with himself and unseen others that "manipulate markets". Who is more likely to trade well the next day?

If you are your own employee, how well are you managing yourself? What kind of morale do you maintain in *your* trading business?

Adam says it much better than I do: "Markets are mirrors that show us to ourselves the way the world sees us."

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2 comments:

JF Trader said...

This article on mood hit the spot just now. I quit trading for the day. Usually I trade with a high percentage of wins, but not today. I lost another 3% of my equity. In the past three days I've lost 17% of my equity! Even though I'm in the worst of moods right now, I have to keep it together for my family. This reminder of the power of mood was needed for today. Thank you.

Rich said...

The concept of the market being a mirror is something I truly believe. As a matter of fact my handle on Twitter is "the market mirror" and I speak about it much on my blog and tradng series artandcraftoftrading.blogspot.com