4 Ways to Overcome Your Trading Fears

Posted by tradeyouredge on September 15th, 2014

New traders usually move into the career of trading because they are trying to switch away from their existing career (which is usually non-trading related) or to build extra/side income. Like it or not, these changes indirectly creates pressure and often stirs unnecessary negative emotions.

One of the worst emotions that most trader faces is Fear. If you are one of them, then please read on as I try to share some ideas on how to overcome trading fears.

1. Acknowledgement

The first thing when overcoming fear of trading is to acknowledge that it exists. Fear is just one of the many emotions that any normal human being would possess. Instead, either due to ego or pride, many traders decide to put it aside, thinking that Fear will go away miraculously. That is one of the worst thing to do because, by ignoring it, Fear will hit you when you least expect it to come and it will hit you hard.

On the contrary, and as ironic as it sounds, acknowledgement also includes respecting Fear. This is important because when you start to respect something, you naturally pay more attention to it, you take note of its form and shape as well as finding out how it works.

In a nutshell, you need to consciously embrace Fear and, in my view, the best starting point to this is to have a trading journal that records your emotions. You need to write down when fear strikes you, why it strikes you and how it strikes you.

When you have done it often enough, then you will know when to expect Fear when it next emerges.

2. Stop Trying To Win

The aim of most traders is long term profitability. However, some trading schools fail to emphasise the many profitable trading systems lose more then they win. Yes, believe it or not, many consistently profitable systems have more losing trades than winning ones even though they are profitable.

With that, I strongly encourage traders to stop trying so very hard to win all the time.

As soon as you stop trying to win, the expectation of winning subsides and when there is nothing to expect from the trade, there is nothing to fear.

Do you see the knock-on effect of trying to win?

Instead of focusing on winning or losing, I believe it is more important to aim to trade your system flawlessly i.e. try to perfect your trading edge. This leads me to my next topic.

3. Perfecting Your Trading Edge

Making every effort to perfect your trading edge is a good way to reduce or eliminate fear.

In my view, this is somewhat similar to the car industry. In theory, driving a car is a high risk and life threatening activity. However, as people have put their trust in the car manufacturers, they start to relax and to enjoy the car as it is. Part of the reason that trust exist is because car manufacturers constantly upgrade and continuously perfect their technology. This gives assurance to the users that every effort has been made to make the car safe.

Likewise, if you make every effort to improve, protect and perfect your trading edge, the level of trust you have will continue to increase. This means your level of fear will decrease, assuming you execute your trading edge accordingly.

4. Focus on the Now

Believe it or not, very often, fear is triggered by voices that we hear in our mind. These voices usually come from our subconscious mind and they have no factual evidence to support them.

Our subconscious mind is very susceptible to information generated from our conscious mind and, hence, it is important to work our conscious mind. Typically, I would suggest feeding it with positivity, however, in this context a better idea is to focus on the now.

By that, I mean to focus on what you need to do now to make the next trade a good one. Focusing on actions helps avoid (but not eliminate) negative images on our mind. The key is really being focus, think about what you need to do now, decide on it and just doing it. There is no point looking at your past trading results or thinking about the future (since you have no idea what’s going to happen in the future). Hence, putting all your energy and making the next trade perfect is a good way to eliminate fear.

Conclusion

Overcoming or reducing trading fears is an on going process and everyone works differently. Hence, it is important to keep an open mind and make sure to keep trying different ways to overcome/reduce it until it works. The beautiful thing about fear is that once you manage to control and remove it the once, it becomes easier and easier the next time you do it.

Thank you for reading and have a good weekend ahead!