Following on from the previous post about Logic and Intuition I found the talk of Biases interesting. After all we all make them, some rightly and some wrongly… the hard bit is differentiating between the two! To do that effectively you need to have perspective on the whole situation! And I don’t just mean the whole situation within the market, I mean the whole situation within the market, you and your world.
The image shown is a way in which our cognitive thought processes act. As you can see there is more involved than one would initially think.
The ‘situation’ or the ‘market’ if you like is only one factor… while it’s an important one for everyone it’s also the reason some people are good at predicting the market movements but as soon as they back it up with money everything seems to go wrong! The way in which you may ‘feel’ when you are out of the market may be much more rational than when you are in it, it’s a good reason to use minimum stakes and have little targets. Id also add it’s probably a reason those that don’t ‘need’ the money so much manage to produce better results or learn that bit quicker, don’t be disheartened though if you’re not in a privileged position as I certainly wasn’t when I started to learn!
I guess what im trying to say here is your feelings shape your ‘perspective’ on a situation producing a biased view. But that’s all it does, it doesn’t change the situation!
So with a little work on how you ‘feel’ it could change quite a lot! – one way to change how you feel as suggested in the previous post may be to just target the situations you perform better in, it doesn’t change all that long to build up your self-esteem through consistent results…. however there are more, lowering stakes, lowering expectations (having none even), aligning your surroundings (mentioned in many previous posts).
Some other good ways while actually in the market to make yourself ‘feel’ more comfortable, are to execute and set your trades where by you are in a position to profit faster or be exposed for a shorter period or even scaling out once a winning position is opened.
Open a few trades and think about how you feel in that moment, then try it again with a bigger/smaller stake… it shows feeling has a lot to do with things when trading manually.
If you want to keep yourself more centred and see things clearly I’d advise experimenting with scaling out your stakes as the market favours you, particularly when looking for a swing trade.