Trading - To Thine Ownself Be True
Trading is one of the world’s most competitive professions. Intelligence helps pave the way for investing success, of course. But intelligence isn’t enough. History is full of examples of really smart traders who’ve somehow managed to blown up their accounts. “The Big Short,” Michael Lewis’ now-classic novel about the financial crisis of 2007-08, showed us how entire armies of traders were afflicted by the same greed-based blindness despite their obvious intelligence—a blindness so pervasive only a relative few managed to assess the situation properly and exploit it. So, no, the key to investment success isn’t necessarily pure, raw, numbers-crunching, competition-outflanking intelligence.
What is it then?
It’s Emotional Intelligence—the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically. From a trader’s perspective, emotional intelligence requires you to know yourself well, to know yourself honestly, to see your own strengths and weakness clearly so you don’t get carried away by greed or find yourself paralyzed by fear.
Knowing your own psychology, therefore, is crucial to trading success. Bad trades have a way of disrupting your equilibrium. One bad trade leads to another. Then another. Then another. An avalanche careening downhill, taking your hard-earned capital with it. Your mind becomes clouded. Your emotions take over. They tell you there’s a plot. The markets are against you. Just after you enter a market order to buy, the market turns down. Then, after you get stopped out, it turns around and goes back up again, just like you thought it initially would.
What now?
Do you double down? Do you get back in? No. Probably not. Now you’re afraid. You double-think the situation. You got tricked once before. You’ll get tricked again. Then what happens? You sit there and watch as the market blasts to new highs while you remain flat, nursing your stopped-out loss. Even worse, ruminating about being right about the direction of the market, but not participating in a great bull move you correctly anticipated.
Sound familiar?
You might have seen others live through this exact scenario. Perhaps you’ve even lived through it yourself, or one similar to it.
What to do?
Most likely, somewhere deep within your personal psychology, your mind has been “emotionally hijacked.” Negative emotions—such as fear or greed or self-loathing—have taken over your subconscious. These subconscious negative emotions can lead to negative beliefs about yourself: I don’t deserve to be rich. Money is bad. I’m not as smart as everyone else, how can I possibly succeed?
In short, negative emotions lead to negative beliefs and these negative beliefs quickly find their expression in the highly competitive world of investing—losing trades.
Hypnotherapy is tailormade for these types of situations. Within a relatively short period of time, and for a relatively small cost, a skilled hypnotherapist can help you identify and overcome those self-sabotaging emotions and beliefs which are preventing you from reaching your fullest potential.
As a dedicated investor trained to seek out new low risk/high reward opportunities, what better risk/reward ratio could you expect to find in today’s highly competitive marketplace?
Thomas C. Williams
Clinical Hypnotherapist
Copyright © 2018 by Thomas C. Williams