There are two groups of traders that I see struggling:
1) Newbies
2) Experienced traders trying to regain a lost edge
Both experience considerable frustration and discouragement, and both often turn to trading psychology for help.
The hidden cause of their trading psychology problems, however, is what I discuss in the most recent Forbes article: they short-circuit the learning process and never truly internalize a new edge in the markets they're trading.
The odds of trading success go way up if you do the learning process right.
This is true for all performance domains, and it's why we see coaches and mentors in fields as diverse as athletics and performing arts.
The central skill of trading is pattern recognition. The central element of success is drawing upon pre-existing talents and interests. Simply trying to copy someone else's "setups" is not going to create genuine learning or performance.
Many, many of the problems that trading psychologists talk about are due to failures of learning and development processes, not failures of the psyche. As Nate Michaud of Investors Underground recently pointed out, these problems follow from an overfocus on profitability at the expense of cultivating sound trading processes.
Further Reading:
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