8/30/2026 - Many traders identify emotion as the key enemy to trading success. Emotion, however, is just one manifestation of a larger trading challenge: focus. Successful traders are able to achieve a laser focus on markets--and they are able to sustain that focus throughout their trading. Building our capacity for focus is one of the most important things we can do to achieve trading success.
When we are fully focused, we see more in markets. We see more detail, and we see more context. In an earlier post, I distinguished three facets of focus: 1) intensity of focus; 2) flexibility of focus; and 3) sustainability of focus. In other words, we want to zoom in on what is important, shift our attention to view the context of what is important, and maintain this process without undue distraction. Many, many times, emotional disruptions of trading occur when we first lose our concentration. The emotions are the result of the problem, not the primary problem themselves.
It is better to trade only part of the trading day with full focus than attempt to trade the entire day with distractions.
Indeed, we build our focus muscles when we practice trading and review and replay market action. As I point out in the
Positive Trading Psychology book, we can monitor our heart rate and brain waves in real time to actually see how calm and focused we are. We can also practice meditative techniques with these same monitors to directly work on achieving and sustaining focus. Indeed, performing meditation prior to market sessions is a great way to prepare ourselves for the trading day.
Focus is our magnifying glass. We can turn every trading session and every review into an exercise in sustained concentration. Our great trading enemy is not emotion. It is distraction.
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8/28/2026 - We have to lose many times before we internalize the resilience to know that we have what it takes to succeed. If each loss is a learning lesson that we review in intensive detail and burn into our brains, then we have moved forward in our development even as we step back in our P/L. It's necessary to bounce back many times before we truly know that nothing can keep us down. Confidence doesn't come from positive thinking. It comes from overcoming loss, again and again.In his book Best Loser Wins, Tom Hougaard points out that "An elite soldier is scared to death the first time he is in a combat situation. That is why his first combat situation will be a simulation. And the next one. And the next one. And little by little, his fear is trained out of him, through the use of repetition, breathing awareness, and habituation" (p. 37).
We start by trading in simulation mode or very small. We lose. We jump at the opportunity to learn from the loss: learn how to better enter and exit, how to better identify opportunities. We lose again. We again jump at the opportunity. As we start to win, we get a little bigger. We lose. We delve into learning from the losses. Again and again. Soon, as Hougaard notes, our fear is trained out of us. It's not that we're confident that each trade will be a winner. We're confident that our development will win even when we lose. We know that our development will win *because* of what we will do when we lose. Turning losses into learning is perhaps the most important trading psychology technique. The intensity and repetition of our learning is directly responsible for its impact on our mindset.
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