The Trader’s State of Mind: Hype, Hope or Harmony?

Most of us, at different times in our lives or different moments in the day, will think a thought like “When I have more money, then I will be happy.” As traders, we perform the same mental mechanisms that we believe will create a sense of satisfaction for our trading efforts. This trader’s state of mind of creating a future world that holds the answer to our happiness also prevents us from deriving satisfaction from our current trader’s state of mind.

Many of us come to trading because it has the potential of fulfilling our dreams. Trading does not require the approval of our parents, family or community. Trading does not require cooperation from our boss, our employees or our shareholders. Trading does not require us to convince anyone of anything. It is all under our own control. For those of us who have been frustrated by dealing with other humans in our ecosystem, trading has the potential to free us from all of these human constraints and give us significant income to fulfill our fondest wishes.

Let’s take a closer look at what actually happens when we have the thoughts that say “I’ll be satisfied when XYZ…” What this does is create a process of hoping that we can be happy, wealthy, successful or consistently profitable at some time in the future. This process creates a number of neural patterns that we call NEMES or neuro meta-structures. When we kick off these NEMES with hope for a better future, and we do this often enough, these neural connections become wired together in a way that when triggered, feel better than the thought of a less successful future.

This trader’s state of mind, like any drug, makes us feel better in the moment. But the unintended consequences of the process are that it is more difficult to actualize that same successful future. In order to actualize the successful future, we need to risk the dream with real data, hard work, testing, and excellent execution. This effort creates the possibility that we may be unable to actualize our dream. Thus we stay in the process of hoping for a better future rather than creating a better future.

We cannot experience happiness in our life yesterday. We cannot experience happiness in our life tomorrow. We can only experience happiness and its resulting satisfaction right now in this very moment.

To build a better traders state of mind the first step is increased awareness. You can do this by carrying a small note card or notebook with you and writing down every time that you are hoping for a better feeling in the future. What feeling are you looking for? What event could trigger this feeling? How often do you have these thoughts? How many different events are critical for future positive experiences?

If you find yourself hoping for events in the future that can create satisfactory experiences as a significant part of your mental processes, then I have some good news for you. It is possible to intentionally create a trader’s state of mind with the feelings that you want right now. Not in the past, nor in the future.

First, start with the awareness by journaling your thoughts. Secondly, accept these thoughts as having a good intention for your life. And finally make a list of alternative thoughts that give you the same satisfaction right now in the moment. For example, you could find a time in your life or a specific behavior that satisfied what you need for your dream. Step into that moment, experience that satisfaction right now by re-creating the memory. Since our brains are often confused between fantasy and reality you can actually create new neural pathways or Mind Muscles™ .

This process can take some time with good support, but you can also do this on your own by using your own commitment to trading success and creating a masterful trader’s state of mind. This process can turn hype and hope into internal harmony by recognizing the power of the present moment.

 

Trading Psychology: The Inside and the Outside

There are two parts to trading psychology that when understood lead to better trading decisions.

First let’s look at the outside. The market itself is not an objective, rational Spock -like machine. The markets are made up of the emotional decisions and inputs from an aggregation of millions of humans.

The good news about this is that the human brain operates much the same way for most humans. The processes and patterns that it generates can be seen in charts of most asset classes. So to be clear, what we are really trading is not the reality of the underlying asset class, but patterns of human decision-making that are skewed by the the brain biases.

So what we are really doing as traders is to use trading psychology as a way to elicit brain patterns of our fellow fallible humans as a way of creating a predictive edge.

The more we understand the markets as a reflection of trading psychology, the more we are able to view the patterns that it creates in a proper context. Now we are able to connect that context with the reality of the market drivers, the human condition.

That said, the more critical piece in successful trading is to understand the inside, or our own psychological state of mind. It is been argued that our own state of mind is anywhere from a 25% to 100% contributor to trading success. In my model of trading psychology, I prefer to think of our own internal state of mind closer to the 100% contribution.

In order to survive in the world, our brains need to take an immense amount of information filter, categorize, compress, and take shortcuts to be able to manage the information. Because survival depends on making decisions, we can’t make decisions with an infinite amount of information. Thus before we even start the decision process our reflection of reality is already significantly distorted. So our own psychological state and how we manage this information becomes a significant impediment or tool depending on our own self-awareness.

In my model of successful trading we can improve our results significantly by first understanding the psychology of the markets. In this model we shift fundamental information from supply and demand to the psychological and emotional inputs from the market players. Then we look at our own psychological states to be able to handle this new fundamental information and own decision processes in order to improve our trading results.

Needless to say the skill of market awareness as a psychological phenomenon, and personal awareness in real time of own psychological states is a lifelong journey. These are not easy skills to obtain. However it is much better to work on the right hard problem than to work on the wrong hard problem. Simply understanding that this is our job as traders in and of itself is a huge step in the right direction.