Turn Your Trading Around

Highstrike Trading

TURN YOUR TRADING AROUND

It’s no secret that learning how to trade is not an easy feat. It’s emotionally draining, you can lose a lot of money, and it can make you start second guessing everything,

So why do so many people still want to become traders? Because of the freedom and lifestyle that comes along with being a professional trader. It isn’t easy, but it is absolutely doable!

If you feel like you’re in a rut, don’t know what steps to take next, and are feeling lost. Look no further. We will show you exactly how to turn your trading around to become successful beyond belief.

It’s not easy, but anything worth having never is. Time to put down the pen and paper and get to work.

LEARNING HOW TO REGAIN CONTROL

If you feel in control of something in your life, you usually do not see negative emotions such as anger, depression, and anxiety. You are prepared for whatever the outcome of their situation may be.

If you feel out of control, emotions start to take over and negativity, doubt, and uncertainty start to sink in. Before you know it, you have convinced yourself that the goals you want to achieve are never going to happen because you have lost control of your mindset.

So what do you do? It’s time to regain control and turn your trading around. How do you do that?

Remove the “poison” from your life and trading. Chances are if it’s hurting your trading, it’s hurting your life as well
- Become active in understanding everything about your poison and what it’s doing to you. The more oxygen you take away from a flame, the easier it is to control. Same with whatever is making you lose control.
Question and review everything
- Review all of your trading results, positive and negative. This will help you to determine any and all patterns you are making.
- Particularly – pay attention to what was going on during your big wins and losses. Are you aware of what you were you feeling? What was your approach? What was your state of mind? Are you able to reproduce these patterns and processes again to implement these strategies into your daily trading?
Figure out your patterns and make a new set of rules
- Once you can figure out the patterns in your trades, you now have a game plan for regaining control in your trading.
- Develop new rules that allow you to follow this game plan to be able to see how these changes impact your trading.

RECOGNIZE YOUR PATTERNS AND HABITS

The most important step to regaining control is recognizing the themes and patterns you’ve created for yourself. So how do we make sense of this?

Chances are if you have these bad habits in your trading, they flow over into your everyday life. If you feel like you don’t have control over different aspects of your life, how do you expect to have control over your trading?

So how do you find these themes to turn your trading around?

Since we are usually oblivious to our patterns, we’re going to do an exercise
- Write out the best and worst times in your life. When you look at your best experiences, what themes did you recognize? What about with your worst?
- Now do this with your trades. Write out your best and your worst trades and the themes you experience with those.
Identify the emotions that come with these themes and patterns
- If you are able to be aware of the emotions that start taking place before your bad patterns start happening, it’s almost like a warning sign.
- Once you are able to identify the emotions, you can remove yourself from the situation and avoid falling back into bad patterns.
Separate yourself from the problem
- Many times we take on the problem as part of our personality. “I’m a bad trader.”, “I’m a bad spouse.”, “I suck at ___.”
- You are not a bad trader, you took a bad trade. You do not suck at ____, you made a mistake.

Another way to turn your trading around is to look at your pattern like it is an evil friend or significant other. They want to control you and ruin your happiness in life. Are you going to let them? Why do they get to take your happiness and success from you? They don’t!

This is called narrative therapy. With this therapeutic process, the goal is to separate the person from their problem. It helps to not use the problem as an identity (IE: “I’m a bad trader.”), and forces you to use your skills to get the problem to go away.

How do you get that evil friend or significant other to stop controlling you? You have to make them go away. Same with your trading habits.

CHANGING PROBLEM PATTERNS AND HABITS

Recognizing the problem is the first step to changing your patterns. Just as it takes a long time to form a habit, many people think it takes just as long to break one.

This is untrue. Discipline (positive or negative) takes time and structure to build. You can unlearn discipline in a matter of days though.

The last step to turn your trading around is to unlearn bad habits and restructure them into healthy ones, there are many elements one can use to change.

Focus
- The best way to achieve success in something is to focus on one thing at a time. The more you focus on changing everything all at once, the more likely you are to fail. Make a list of every habit you want to improve and focus on only one at a time for the best and most disciplined results.
Structured Learning and Homework
- To learn and rehearse new skills, you will want to start with paper trading first. This way you can physically perform the action, but not have any risk to it. The more familiar you become with it, the more risk you start adding until you have mastered the techniques.
- Practice makes perfect. You need to practice these skills until they become familiar and automatic to you. Your homework will need to target specific aspects of the pattern you are wanting to change and work on.
Mastery
- The idea behind mastery is to create a sense of confidence in oneself that will allow you the confidence to feel like you have regained control in your life. This starts with imagery and manifestation and then moves to real-world application.

In conclusion...

The steps taken to turn your trading around can be quite the learning curve. We’ve all been there!

The best and most professional traders have all been in the exact spot you’re in now. How else do you think they became the best?

The condition the market is in now is one that is really difficult to not only trade but to learn in as well. Many hard lessons are being taught and you can easily overcome these obstacles, you just have to be willing to put in the work to do so!

Highstrike Trading