Stop Sabotaging Your Trades: Strategies for Emotional Control

Are you easily triggered into placing emotional trades? If you are, you're not alone. It's Brian McAvoy here with Inside Out Trading and today we're going to take a look at this because this is one of the most frustrating things about trading is. Yeah, when something happens and that causes us to place emotional traits where consciously we know not what we're supposed to be doing and it's something driving us and we're sitting there watching ourselves, very consciously aware of it, doing it anyway. So frustrating, especially for people like us. Traders on the average, the whole population, look at the whole population of traders. Traders generally are above average people. Discipline, got good work ethic, smarter than average, more successful than average. I mean, trading is not an entry level job. Most traders have professional level jobs or run their own businesses. And so we're not an average bunch of. And so to be making stupid mistakes and sitting here watching ourselves do it, it's not like it was something that happened and escaped our attention. It's like, no, we're sitting there watching to do it. It's really aggravating. And so if you can relate to this, take just a minute for this video because I've got some hopefully helpful advice for you. In the 19 years I've been working with traders, plus my own experience, what I found is there are certain things that are really important to stay aware of, especially when it comes to some of these self sabotaging things that we do, the things that hurt us that we really regret later. And one of the first things to keep in mind is that we're playing a long game and so we gotta pull our focus back a bit, don't get caught up in the moment, keep our, keep our focus wide so that instead of saying I'm worried about right now, I'm worried about this minute, I'm worried about today. No, I want to have a good week, I want to have a good month. I'm in the long game. I'd still want to be trading a month from now, six months from now, a year from now. And so I can't afford to allow myself to get caught up in the moment. So that's one of the first things you can do. But really one of the biggest things to recognize is that a lot of these things, they're a response pattern that somewhere along the way began in us as traders. And so this falls into the realm of behavioral psychology, recognizing that so much of the time what we're doing and what we experience comes from some pattern that's been kind of Drilled into us somewhere along the way. And it's a response pattern. And that's why it happens almost on a subconscious level as far as the driver behind it and the prompt for the action. But understanding that it's behavioral psychology, that in and of itself, for me, a long time ago, when I was learning about this, when I started learning about behavioral psychology back in high school, loved it and. But the thing is with almost everything that happens when we're doing something and it's a triggered response that seems to happen on autopilot, again, consciously we're observing it, can't seem to get a conscious handle on it. It's a programmed response. Now the first thing to understand is it's a response to something. Something triggered that response. And so it's super important that we raise our self awareness and as we're going through the day, and especially in our trading, that we're not just watching the market, looking for our opportunity to make money, we're observing ourselves. And if you find that you do this from time to time, super, super important that you're observing yourself, you keep your self awareness very high. And what you want to look for is not what happened and how, you know, how badly it went and how he felt about it afterwards. Those are important. You want to capture those too. But really what you want to be looking for is what was happening right before that, what's happening around that. Is it the general market conditions and like right now where we've got pretty volatile markets, not really trending markets, volatile markets. Okay. Or are we just kind of ignoring that and saying, I'm gonna, I wanna go and try to trade anyway? And so we're setting ourselves up to get triggered because we have a specific method. It works when markets are trending. But this, these are volatile markets. Are we just plain ignoring some of our common wisdom before we start the day? And then also once we're in the, once we're in the trading day, yeah, we're actively trading. Say it's more normal, normal conditions, but we're again, we're observing the behavior happening again. Don't just look at what happened, look at what was happening right before that. Because it's the trigger that we want to get a handle on. If we can get a handle on the trigger, then we can address the response. Now the other thing, and this is huge, one of the hard lessons, and fortunately I did go through it my early trading years, is to get some outside help. One of the toughest things about trading is, I mean, that's a Wonderful thing about it too. The wonderful thing about trading is yeah you don't have, you don't have a bunch of employees, you don't have customers, you don't have to vendors, you know, it's just you and the markets. That's also a downside to it because as traders we all have blind spots. We, there are certain things that we just, we can't see the forest for the trees, so to speak. And so to get the outside help, get the outside perspective can be tremendously helpful. I mean my first year of trading one of the biggest lessons I got out of it was I was my own limitation. I didn't know what I didn't know and I couldn't see what I couldn't see. And so long as I was doing, trying to do everything by myself without any outside help, I'm gonna, I'm limited by my own limitations but by my own knowledge limitations, by my own perceptual limitations. And it was one, it was only when I got help that was really start I was able to start getting some different perspective, start seeing the things that I was missing, bring my blind spots into the light so that now I can address them and fix them. It's huge. So really again starts with self awareness, self observation but then getting the outside perspective is absolutely huge. Now if you're curious. Yeah. What kind of stuff might you be missing? Well I created a self assessment for traders which you can check out@insideouttrading.com and just swing by there. It's free and but you answer a handful of questions and it'll give you some good insights as to what's going on with you and your trading, where you're currently at and what are some of the likely obstacles, some of the things might be tripping up and so just inside out trading, take the assessment, you'll find it beneficial and it will definitely help you to see at least as a first step what are some of the things that might be tripping you up, what you can start doing to address them and get things on track. Stop making the emotional trades that we all regret. So I hope this been helpful. If it has, give me a like and subscribe down below. Share this with your friends, post it on your social media and if you got a comment down below if you'd like to see certain videos or what are the what happens when you find yourself getting triggered into trades? It kills me because I know how much it costs me first year not getting a handle on my trade. It cost me almost 50 grand and it seems to be kind of a magic number. A lot of guys this year coming to me, they lost 50 grand or 1. One guy, he lost over 200 grand just in not having not getting a handle on his trading. Unfortunately, when you get the help getting back to hey, yeah, this is a long game. I want to do what I need to do, addressing my own issues so that, yeah, I can be trading a year from now, three years from now, and trading consistently, profitably, comfortably enjoying it and not giving back on my profits to the markets. That's like so many traders do for years. So again, I hope this been helpful. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers.