* This Forbes article examines research on meditation and how meditative practice can make us better traders;
* This Three Minute Trading Coach video describes a technique for reprogramming our minds by pairing stressful trading scenarios with a calm, focused state;
* This Three Minute Trading Coach video illustrates a quick technique for entering calm, focused states in trading.
From these three posts, we can identify a very important trading psychology insight:
It's not emotion that interferes with our trading; it's the inability to stay grounded in the present.
Think about it: Many of the problematic emotions of trading take us out of the present moment. When we feel fear, we're worried about the future. When we're afraid of taking a trade, we're regretting a recent loss. When we're pushing ourselves to size up, we're focused on the future. When we focus on a missed trade or a poor exit, we're caught in the past.
It's the distraction of the past and present that prevents us from being truly immersed in markets and feeling the patterns that we've studied and observed. Even if you *could* eliminate emotion from trading, you'd wind up losing your *feel* for markets. We want that capacity to feel! But we want to stay grounded in the present, as the observer of our feelings, so that we can distinguish a feeling taking us back to the past or one caught up in the future versus one that comes from a deep, intuitive feel of what is happening here and now.
If you're struggling with discipline in your trading, perhaps it's not emotion that you need to banish. Perhaps it's mindfulness that you need to boost. That is a game changer in trading psychology.
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