Creating your trading zone

So how do people go on tilt? How do they freak out? How do they dig themselves into a ditch that they don’t want to be in? Well, you can figure it out. Today’s Wednesday. We talked about preparedness. We talked about creating your list. We talked about putting yourself in a spot where you’re only looking at tickers, be them equities or commodity futures where you can affect trades, where you know, have an edge. Obviously with that edge, there’s positive expected value where over longer periods of time when you put on those trades that you’ll make more money than you’ll lose. Now, how do you put yourself into a spot?

How do you put yourself into a spot where you can be in the zone and avoid frustration? Because you can see now that if you are trying to get prepared, but you’re focusing or you’re preparing on the wrong things, you can see where all these other emotional outbursts can come from. You can find yourself in a lot of frustration or anger. It doesn’t necessarily have to always come out negative, but if you force a trade or you force a situation, even in life, it doesn’t feel comfortable. So you need to think about if you’re doing your preparation right in Victoria’s War, Victoria’s Warrior’s first win and then seek battle. And then you’re trying to isolate those instances in the marketplace where you can affect your edge when you trade. Anything beyond that will help you harvest feelings that might be trying to communicate with you, but have really nothing to do with your trading successfully.

So in your need, for example, to feel as if you’ve made it as a trader, for example, which is a strong pull for everybody, myself included, because you need that feedback from the marketplace. You might find yourself putting on trades or doing things that don’t really fit with who you are because you want the result. And you’ll hear me say it, you’ll hear a million people say it, who are at the pro level that you want to focus on process. And then the fundamental I said price, moose first, fundamentals follows, but you focus on the process, not the results, which is very hard at the beginning because if anyone says, Hey, how are you doing? What’s the first thing you think about your p and l, how you did that day? And that’s a kind of short term way of looking at things, and I don’t advocate for that. What I totally support is you having a daily process that you can follow and that you can replicate because that’s where your success is going to come from, following that process period over. So for some of you who are very, very active in the marketplace, if you go back and look at what those losing trades were, for example, where in those trades

Were you able to affect your trading edge? You could also look at your winners and say that I got away with something here, or was this due to my trading edge, right? Because you can have a situation where you do everything wrong, but you put on a trade, you make money thinking like you’re onto something. But in fact, it’s really a process that you shouldn’t be following and getting rewarded for that can lead you down a path, not fortuitous say. So this is how you start to harvest emotions and feelings is when you go outside bit, you know, do behavior that’s not consistent with what your goals are, which is why when we do consulting, the first thing we think about are goals, and they’re not goals. I want to have this or I want to have that. It’s a whole unique way you’re looking at it that helps people organize their behavior and keeps their behavior congruent with what they want out of their life, at least professionally.

So think about that. Make sure that you’re only trading when you can affect your edge. And if you’re doing something beyond that, realize that you might be looking for some kind of emotional fulfillment for that particular moment in time, which you might be able to get doing something else in your life. You don’t necessarily have to put money to risk when you know don’t have an edge, because chances are that in and of itself is a game of negative expectation, right? So it’s hard to make money when the odds and the payoffs are against you. Anyway, please like and subscribe, leave a comment. Otherwise, if you want to reach out privately, you know where to reach me. I appreciate you being here, folks. I will see you tomorrow.

Subscribe to the show  

Click here to  get your free copy of The Inner Voice of Trading audiobook.

This is an automated transcript