Breaking the Habit of Overtrading

How do you break the habit of over trading? You're trained, you have a plan, and you're about to trade that plan, and before you know it, you get into heat and you're sitting there and all those best laid plans just get sucked down the vortex. How does that happen? And suddenly you're over trading. You're taking trades that you don't need to be in. All of a sudden, you're no longer in that calm, disciplined state of mind. You're all over the place and you've lost your stuff. The damage reports there. Okay, how do you go about doing that? What just happened? Let's take it and take. Let's take a look at it first. From what happens on a work level, most people coming into trading literally have been taught that what you really want to be doing is taking action. You've got to be trading to be trading. They will have come in from businesses and corporate life where, you know, taking action, doing something, making something happen really worked. It allowed them to grow, it allowed them to win. It allowed them to become who they could be in that environment. The problem is this, is that doesn't work in trading. What works in trading is something completely different. But first, let's go back to this. You've come to this moment of where you really have learned that taking action, making things happen, does in fact produce positive results. What the brain does when it sees that is it says, oh, what a successful solution in the short term.

For results, for survival. And it will literally glue it in. It will give you a burst of dopamine, okay, dopamine. The closest equivalent we can talk about is cocaine. And you get this enormous reward that takes the brain and says, oh, I like that. I am going to habituate that. And before you know it, you have a great habituation for literally saying, okay, when I see that I need to be trading, I need to be doing something, I need to be taking action in order to be able to control the outcome, make things happen. That's how the pattern gets set up. Suddenly what happens is you're a stalker or you're a person who has a bias to chase trades. So you get in, you say, well, I'm sitting here, I'm bored. No, dopamine mean there, okay? The brain's saying, I'm bored, I'm bored. You need to be doing something. This is not how you produce success. So what it does is all of a sudden you start getting this urgency to act, to make things happen. Before you know it, dopamine and testosterone are running through your blood. You don't have the ability of making good rational decisions about risk. That's the testosterone. And you want to feel good. You want to feel that rush.

Okay, there's the ticket right there that habituates. It's been very successful. It's a successful behavior. And you're kind of stuck in there. It's a habit. It's a trait. Then you go to trading that doesn't work anymore. Trading has a completely different success formula. You don't make things happen. In trading, what happens is instead of the urgency to act to make things happen, what you develop is the urgency to be patient.

Okay? You wait for the prey to come to you. You wait for the setup to come to you. Completely different. This causes most guys to really trader, guys really to examine what they mean by work. Most people believe that work is literally about taking action, doing things, busyness, okay? That's what's been wired in. The work of trading is very different.

The work of trading is patience. This is the piece that you have to get. Otherwise, when you walk in, you say, you know something? I don't have a whole bunch of time. You know, I need to make this happen. I have a quota I need to be hitting today. You know, I have a target I need to be hitting. You know something, I only have so many years owning so much money. I need to be doing something. There's an urgency here. I have to make this happen. Wrong. You walk into that arena of trading like that and you are going to blow up accounts, you're going to bleed your account.

The training is very simple. You begin to go, okay, what I see is I see myself. I like this. I like this excitement. I like this dopamine. I like this chase. You know, I can feel it build up. I can. You know, it feels so good to be ready to do something. And yet at the same time, that's. Short term.

Trading requires a different mindset. It requires a mindset of thinking in probabilities in the long term, so that statistically you're a winner over time. The biology and most likely the psychology that you bring into trading wants short term success right now. Do you see the polarity there? Until you decide to say, you know, I'm going to go in and change that neural pathway, that circuitry. It doesn't happen like magic. You don't say, well, I'm just going to go plug in another external unit into my trading mind. And suddenly I'm going to move from certainty thinking and making things happen to probability thinking where I Understand that I have to develop the patience to wait for it to come to me. That requires work, that requires going in and literally, almost like being a neurosurgeon and going in and doing neurosurgery on circuitry, okay. It takes enormous courage, it takes enormous foresight to be able to see that was really successful back then, this urgency to act and make things happen. But the truth is, most people come in and blow up a lot of accounts, they bleed a lot of accounts, and they finally come to the realization that that doesn't work.

You can take a shortcut, you can start noticing the urgency. And it's hard to notice it at first because it feels so good. That's the dopamine. The moment that you start feeling good in trading is you've already stepped down the slope, the slippery slope. What you're looking to is say, you know something. I know I have this tendency to start getting really pretty excited, feeling good and I'm ready to get down there, make things happen. The moment you catch yourself like that, that's when you start disrupting the pattern. It starts with breath, then it starts with stepping back into mindfulness and start noticing the pattern, noticing the belief of I need to be taking action, to be doing something.

And then you reorganize that into higher functioning. You start going, no. What this is really about is the development of patience as a practice. You're going to do that long time before it becomes a trait. And out of that patience, what you start noticing is a calmness that has to be acceptable, otherwise you fall into boredom. The whole notion between boredom and patience dynamic. If you're trading and are experiencing boredom, you can be sure that your mind has urgency to act and chase trading mentality. If that happens, you need to look and say, what is this belief system that's showing up in my mind that is polluting my ability to interpret data very well? And you're going to see the need for instant success. You're going to see the need to prove the self, to make yourself powerful. On the other hand, as you start developing patience and realize that boredom is telling you where to look if you want to become a trader. And patience, what you're looking at is going, okay, now at patience, I wait and I'm going to see what the markets are going to give me. I'm going to wait and see what the markets are going to give me. And if you hear a bunch of conversation in your head, yeah, yeah, yeah, but take this trade. What you realize you have the internal struggle and you have work until that internal struggle of action, action is taken care of. To the patience. Steady, steady, steady. Strike.

You're stuck. This is the big divide. And it literally is a process. It's not something you change like magic. It's a process that starts with emotional regulation. Then it goes to mindfulness and recognizing the structure that you're stuck in and beginning to disrupt it. Then it goes to developing the internal traits that allow you to trade patiently and with discipline. Recognizing that less is more.

Less is more. And you realize that patient is victory. You begin to wait and you recognize that. You know, the mind that I brought to trading was a very good mind for what I used to do. It's just that it's not good with what I'm doing now. And it's time to tweak it. It's time to change it. And I need to evolve to become the trader. I can be the trader that consistently waits for the trades to come to them patiently. Takes action.

When it's warranted, not when you get all excited or flustered or wondering if you're ever going to make it. It's from a very calm center.

That's the trader state of mind. Friends, if you want to learn, explore more explore my article this month. Explore my website and start really looking about what it's going to take to produce the mine that trades like a patient killer. Take care.

Ra.