A short YouTube talk by Kardec Trader arguing that many traders suffer from emotional hijacking—dwelling on past losses or anxiously predicting the future—rather than focusing on the present moment. The speaker emphasizes that traders cannot control market outcomes but can control the mind they bring to execution; training mindfulness and emotional regulation increases the probability of trading success.
Hello. Have you ever been in a review of your trades and you take a look at the trade and you go, where was my mind? What was I doing?
What was I thinking? Well, the truth is.
Is that when you're doing that part of it is an emotional hijacking. And there is an emotional hijacking, there's a triggering to uncertainty, there's the whole thing that occurs where literally old programmed behaviors from the past start predicting the future. Okay.
That I have plenty of information about. But let's talk about what happens to the mind. The mind now influenced not by calm authority, but by a fear of the past. Need to reclaim the past or the future. Wanting to prove the self, wanting to wonder what's going up there. What happens in trading is this, is that most traders spend their time out there anticipating the future. They're sitting there looking at their trade in real time and they're already anticipating what's going on, the future. Oh, my God, what if I make a mistake? You better take your profits now. You know I could, you know, God, this thing's going to ride forever. I need to go ahead and take this thing, take my stops away, take my targets away. You're living in the future. At that moment, or a lot of traders during real time, they find themselves in the past. My God, look what happened. You know, that could happen again. I have to be careful. You know something, I have losses in the past. I need to make up for them now.
What I want you to notice.
They'Re not controlling the one thing that they can control. They're not controlling the present moment. They're worried about the future, which they have no control on. They're worried about the past. That's already come and gone. But here, now, what happens now in this present moment, the thing that you can control.
Is the mind that you bring to the performance of trading, of execution. That's what you can control. You're here in the present moment. You're not out there. Like for instance, today, it's a beautiful spring day in Charlotte, North Carolina, where I live. I'm worried about my garden. I'm worried about my plants. They haven't got the water that they really need. And I'm thinking, you know, if I don't water it now, if I don't do something now, things are going to go wrong. So I'm sitting about thinking about it. But the truth is I'm not going to have consequences from thinking that way. I'll have enough time to slow down, to calm down and recognize everything's okay. In trading, you don't. Those thoughts about the future hit. They hit enormously high steroid moment, where your mind's already fixated. It's hard to be calm. It's hard to think through things. Suddenly, the hijacking occurs and you're thinking from anxiety. You're thinking about what could be happening in the future.
Not now, the future. Or you're remembering the past, which you also have no control of in the future. You may go, oh, my God. It's all here. I'm going to take this whole thing. I'm going to take the old enchilada. I'm going to make this thing happen. Or. Or, oh, my God, I better take the profits. What I have now. Oh, God, I need to get out of this trade. It's killing me.
Out there. But what about here? Now.
You can't control outcome, friends.
The markets prove that every day. But what you can control is this. You can control the mind that you bring to the performance of the trade in the here and now, not out there, not in the future.
Not back here in the past. Here, now. That's where truly great traders live. They don't live in the future. They don't live in the past. They live right here, right now, in the moment of the trade. That's what they can control, how they interact with the absolute uncertainty of the markets. They know that if they follow the rules, if they do what they're supposed to do, that probability is on their side. They can't control outcome. But what they can control is probability, the chance that they're on the right side. That's what their methodology gives them. That's what being in the moment as a psychology gives them. It's not about then, it's not about now. It's about here now. It's not about way out there in the future that you have no control over. It's not about way back in the past that the booker man may come out and get you. It's kind of like this gremlin. You know, there's a gremlin sitting in your mind and it takes over, okay? And then when you wake up out of the ether when you're doing a review, you go, well, why was I listening to that gremlin?
Okay, the key is you train yourself. You train yourself in mindfulness, you train yourself in emotional regulation so that you apply that mindfulness, you apply that emotional regulation. And you here in the present moment, the gremlin doesn't exist. It's talking about the future or the past. Here in the present moment. This is where you have control. This is where you have the ability to really, truly influence what is going to happen in the future. You manage the probability that's on the table. That's what you've got. Friends.
Welcome.
