Avoid emotional trading
Avoid emotional trading
Trading psychology describes how a trader handles generating
gains and handling losses. It represents their ability to deal with risks and
not deviate from their trading plan. The emotional aspects of investing will
attempt to dictate your every transaction, and your ability to handle your
emotions is part of your trading psychology.
It is impossible to eliminate emotions in trading, but this
should not be the goal in the first place. Instead, traders should understand
how certain biases or emotions can affect their trading and use this
information to their advantage. Every trader is different, and there is no
simple rulebook that everyone should follow.
Identify your personality traits
Develop and follow a trading plan
Have patience
Be adaptive
Take a break after a loss
Accept your winnings
Keep a trading log
Identify your personality traits
One of the keys to developing successful trading psychology
is identifying your personality traits early on. You will need to be honest
with yourself and say if you have impulsive tendencies or if you are prone to
acting out of anger or frustration.
If this is the case, it is important to keep these traits in
check while you are actively trading because they can lead you to make rash and
ill-advised decisions that have little analytical backing. However, it is also
important to play to your personal strengths. For instance, if you are
naturally calm and calculated, you can take advantage of these personality
traits during your time on the markets.
Equally as important as identifying and being aware of your
personality traits and emotions is recognising your biases, as listed above.
Biases are an innate aspect of human nature, but you should be aware of what
your individual biases are before opening or closing any trades.
Develop and follow a trading plan
Having a trading plan is paramount to ensuring that you
achieve your goals. A trading plan acts as the blueprint to your trading, and
it should highlight your time commitments, your available trading funds, your
risk-reward ratio and a trading strategy that you feel comfortable with.
For instance, a trading plan could say that you were going to
commit one hour every morning and evening to trading, and that you will never
commit more than 2% of the total value of your portfolio to any one trade. This
can help minimise losses and limit the effect of emotions on your trading as
the rules for opening or closing a position are already highlighted for you.
Trading plans should also take into account individual
factors that could affect your trading discipline such as your emotions, biases
and personality traits. If you make clear what your biases are before you start
trading, you might be less inclined to act on them.
Have patience
Patience is integral to discipline and it is crucial that
you have patience with your positions. Acting on emotions like fear can lead
you to miss out on a profit by closing a position too early. Trust your
analysis and remain patient and disciplined. Equally, when looking to enter a
trade, it is important to be patient and wait for the opportune moment rather
than just jumping into a trade right then and there.
For instance, if you were wanting to speculate on some GBP
currency pairs like EUR/GBP or GBP/USD, you may want to wait until just before
a Bank of England (BoE) announcement as there tends to be increased volatility
at this time.
Be adaptive
While it is important to have a trading plan, remember that
no two days on the markets are the same, and winning streaks don’t exist in
trading. With this in mind, you should become comfortable in assessing how the
markets are different from day to day and adapt accordingly.
If there is more volatility on one day compared to the day
before and the markets are moving particularly unpredictably, you may decide to
put your trading activity on hold until you’re sure you understand what is
happening. Being adaptive can help to limit your emotions and rule out
representative and status quo biases, enabling you to assess each situation on
its own merits – ensuring that you are pragmatic during your time on the
markets.
Take a break after a loss
Sometimes after a loss, the best thing you can do is walk
away from your trading account for a short while to gather your thoughts and
compose yourself – rather than rushing into another trade in an attempt to
regain some of your losses.
The best traders are those that take their losses and use
them as learning opportunities. They will typically take a few minutes to
themselves before going back to their platform, using this time to assess what
went wrong for that particular trade in the hope that they might avoid making
the same mistake in the future.
In doing so, they keep emotions like pride or fear in check
by letting themselves cool off before approaching the next trade with a clear
head and sound judgment.
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