Emotions are a trader’s worst enemy

The content of this newsletter is for general information and educational purposes only.

You can’t trade with them, and you must trade without them. If you can't keep your emotions in check while trading, you will lose money and lots of it. We want to help minimize this by understanding the two most common emotions interfering with trading results:

FEAR AND GREED

Fear is the most ever-present of the trading emotions, followed in a close second by its partner, greed. I am sure you have often heard that these two are the emotions that drive the market. When you are a trader, you are always under the influence of at least one of these two emotions, even if you don't have any trades on.

Fear and greed are both held in our minds at the same time. Fear motivates retreat. Greed motivates attack. Since they are conflicting emotions, they will immobilize a person until one or the other dominates and overcomes the other. The strongest emotion always wins, and both emotions are necessary, as fear without greed does not move forward. If you had only fear, you would have no reason to trade. If you had only greed, you would have no force to protect you against excessive loss. History shows that, in trading and investing, we need in some form both fear and greed. We need to properly balance and moderate these two emotions.

We can begin by scaling fear back to healthy caution, and scaling greed back to realistic levels, until we get to our best trading zone. You maintain a realistic hunger for profits, while you also maintain a cautioned alertness to danger. Desire and caution hold your hands while you trade.

The Fear of Losing
The strongest and easily manipulated form of fear is your fear of admitting that you are wrong - fear of having your ego bruised. This fear can cause people to do incredibly irrational things. Most people would rather lose thousands of dollars than admit they are wrong. It is easy to feel ashamed of trading losses, and live denying the problem exists. Without taking the steps to address this problem, it will continue in the future. If you start falling into this cycle, consider working with a personal trading coach. Trading, like business, isn’t personal. The market doesn’t care who makes the money, and money doesn’t care who makes it either.

Impact of Fear and Greed on Your Trading
If you are in a position and the market is going up: Greed is telling you to buy more, and fear is telling you to take profit. If it is going down, fear of being wrong makes you hold onto a losing position, and then greed may convince you to buy more; so, it will be easier for you to come back.

If you are not in a position, and the market is going up: Fear is telling you that you're missing out, but it's your greed that causes you to get in just after the greatest increase, just when it is about to reverse its direction.

If you are not in a position and the market is going down: Greed is telling you to get in as the price is low, while fear reminds you that you'll miss out on this opportunity if you don't act fast. Perhaps if we just felt fear, or just felt greed, we would be able to control our emotions a little better. But it is often impossible not to listen, when both of these emotions whisper into our ears at the same time.

To be a winner in the markets, you can never trade from emotion, and the only way to eliminate emotion is to have the discipline to follow your own plan. It’s said most traders never plan a trade, never mind have the discipline to follow one. If you want to become one of the few market winners, you must ‘plan every trade and trade every plan.’

“For many traders, it’s more important to be right than to make money, these traders will hold on to a loss until the pain of losing is greater than the pain of being wrong.” -- Mark Douglas