Rande Howell

2nd part of a 3-Part Series This is the second in a series of articles about interrupting mindless sabotage and building mindful emotional intelligence into your trading. In the first article in this series, Ken had just watched himself on video in disbelief (like many traders), viewing his own emotional hijacking. If he had not seen it with his own eyes, Ken would never have believed what he saw. (Click here to go back to that article for review.) Before viewing the video, Ken thought that his emotional meltdown came out of the blue. But with the video as a dispassionate recorder of the event, he discovered that the emotional hijacking was an unanticipated ambush only because it came out of his lack of awareness. His comment was, “I never realized how soon I fall into fear and act from fear. No wonder I’m having trouble. It was like not seeing an avalanche coming at you until it consumes you.” (I encourage you to go back and read that article so that you have the continuity to appreciate this article.) With the light of awareness that the video gave him, what he saw surprised him. With the aid of external observation of his body, he was able to see that he had been unaware of a process that was right in front of his eyes – hidden in plain sight. Only he did not have the eyes to see it. His eyes, not being trained to observe his body as part of an emotion, did not detect the ambush. There had been plenty of signs that it was coming. But because he did not know to look for the signs, it appeared to him (in his compromised state of mind) as an emotional hijacking. Learning to Observe the Body to Spot the Arousal and Feeling Components of an Emotion When we reviewed the video of the trade where Ken lost emotional control, here is what he saw: 1.Eyes fixated on his screens. Also he was hunched over his screen. 2.His eyes were bulging. 3.He was holding his breath initially. 4.His jaw was clenched. 5.He was rocking in his chair. 6.He was tapping a pen fervently on his desk as he watched the screen. 7.He began breathing heavily. Ken had not been aware of any of these observable phenomena. Yet all of them are parts of an emotion in its arousing stage. This is when an emotion is preparing for action. The emotion is revving up for fight or flight, anger or fear. Because he was mindless to it, it was able to continue to build over a period of 15-20 minutes – a long time for an emotion to build. Next, he saw and heard himself alternately both pleading and cursing as he lost control of his state of mind to an emotional hijacking where fear chemistry was now coursing through his bloodstream and collapsing his rational thinking into fear-based thinking. This is called the feeling component of the emotion. It is too late at this point to stop the emotion from happening – it is already in the bloodstream and corrupting the mind that trades. At this point the feeling component of the emotion is causing him to believe with certainty that bad things are going to happen. At this point the best thing that Ken could have done is to have stepped away from his computer and let the emotional chemistry burn out. Next Ken sees the third part of the emotion of fear called emotional motivation (i.e. avoid, attack, approach) direct the energy of the emotion to get out of the trade so that no more harm can be done. “I need to bail before this thing goes against me,” he thought. This explanation of his situation makes sense to his thinking mind in the heat of this moment and while he is consumed by fear. At this point Ken believes he is powerless to manage the trade. On an emotional level, the operating meaning is that he believes he is incapable of managing uncertainty while in the heat of the trade. This is the meaning component of the emotion. However, if Ken had caught the emotion at or before the point where it began arousing, he could have prevented this emotional hijacking. And he could have had a much better probability of maintaining the mind that could stay emotionally sober during the management of the trade. But because he did not have the awareness to manage his emotions, he never even saw the hijacking coming. Interrupting the Arousal of an Emotion Because emotions are biological, they have a physical signature that is observable. This signature is observable as described by Paul Eckman is his discovery that emotions have consistent encoded expressions embedded in the human face that cuts across all cultures – and Herbert Benson's discovery that each emotion has a unique breathing and tension signature. Fear and joy will have the same encoded expressions in the muscles of the eyes (in particular) and mouth (in general) no matter what part of the world or what culture you come from. Similarly, fear will produce a particular style of breathing and muscular tension required to arouse and maintain the emotion of fear and its impact on thinking. If you disrupt the breathing pattern and the muscular tension associated with the emotion, the associated emotion cannot maintain itself and it cannot ambush and take over the mind. With Ken’s video of himself, he could see his particular signature in action once he began to watch for the signs. For fear to arouse and take over the mind, it has to arouse physically through his muscle tension, breathing style, and his locked-on fixation. This became the focus of where he was going to learn to disrupt the emotion of the fear of missing out on profit from corrupting his mind and causing him to become an irrational human being. Ken was trained to breathe diaphragmatically in moments of stress, rather than to stop breathing or shift to rapid breathing. Fear required the holding of breath or the rapid shallow breathing (that he described as heavy breathing) to ramp up. He also was taught to relax the tension in the body as he entered trades rather than to allow the tension to build up or to ignore it. By volitionally maintaining breathing focused on moving air into the abdomen first and then allowing the breath to expand into the upper chest in a rhythmic manner, Ken is not only disrupting the emotion of fear – he is also calling forward a state of calm. Calm, as an emotional state, requires bellows breathing rather than shallow breathing to call it forward and maintain it. And by relaxing the tension in the body, Ken is doing the same thing. He is physically creating the conditions necessary for the emotional state of calm to produce the mind that "thinks". No longer is Ken mindless of his body. He is able to observe his body as a way to look into his emotional state and to the state of mind that emerges from the emotion. And by training himself to observe breathing and tension in his body as he trades, he is a step ahead of the emotional hijacking pattern of the past. The key here is that he is training himself in both self-awareness and emotional awareness in the context of his trading. Now, not only does he monitor his body with emotional awareness, he also anticipates the times he has a tendency to have problems. He pre-empts waiting for the triggering to happen by calming himself as he moves into the zone where he has had trouble in the past. He is prepared now. Ken is now developing the skill of emotional regulation. He can manage the intensity of the emotion so that it no longer sweeps him away into regrettable emotional vortexes and compromised thinking. (Remember, it made sense to Ken to get out of the trade in the heat of the moment – his thinking was compromised by fear). The problem with most emotional regulation training programs is that they do not focus on managing the emotion in the context of stress. Ken literally was trained to manage his stress by learning how to manage his breathing and muscle tension AS HE IS TRADING. Otherwise, the skills do not transfer from learning in the classroom to learning in the environment that they are to be used. This is why any student of mine spends 3 weeks habituating the emotional regulation skill while he is trading. It takes this long to train the body. There are no other ways to effectively learn this skill. The big factor is that the learning has to be contextual. I often get traders who practice meditation or yoga and wonder why the breathing and relaxation skills learned in these pursuits fail when they apply them to trading. Remaining calm under pressure is not the goal of most breathing and relaxation programs. Trading demands this skill and it must be taught in the pressures found in trading. Otherwise the skill does not generalize from one domain (like the Yoga studio or your calm and quiet place) to the emotional flux of trading. Remember, all thinking is emotional state dependent. You have to train within context. Does Emotional Regulation Solve the Problem? No. Emotional regulation of your emotional nature gives you the skill to manage the intensity of the emotion – not to discover its underlying meaning. Regulating emotions gets you to the "door" of the mind. Without emotional regulation you never get to the door – so it is a necessary element in the design of the trading mind. But once calm, you can look into the mind and begin to observe the hidden beliefs that are at the core of the problem of your performance in trading. Next month we will be looking into the hidden beliefs that keep sabotaging Ken’s trading performance - although he is trying really hard to trade effectively. If you think of hidden beliefs as a submerged submarine armed with torpedoes, you begin to see how your beliefs about your capacity to manage uncertainty that you have pushed out of awareness come back to haunt you in the heat of the moment. These are primitive beliefs that you must come face to face with, acknowledge, and transform to become the trader you know to be possible. Out of the depths either comes the awareness of these submerged beliefs or your mindlessness of these hidden beliefs. If mindless, you meet the torpedoes after it's too late – again. Stay tuned. Rande Howell

Mind is re-adapted by understanding how right and left brain work together. Most of the training traders go through is very left brain oriented with no right brain training. And they end up trading with half a brain -- their left brain. Right brain determines the emotional state that thought will spring from -- and we erroneously believe we can push emotion away. It is this part that has to be retrained for consistent mind for trading. Most practice in a way that continues the bad training. Rande Howell

What I like about the work that I do is that it is self selective. People either connect to it or they don't. The part that puzzles me is why do people who claim that they are not interested in learning about the psychology of trading end up reading and replying to material on the topic. Rande Howell

You're welcome. Rande Howell

we should alert the armed forces to this deterministic point of view. Maybe they will stop training soldiers to certain kinds of emotional responses in the context of combat. When you learn to know yourself, emotional response to circumstance can, and does, change.

You're right. But he can change his mind and alter his course based on circumstance. We are born with predisposition, but are not chained to it, unless you believe that to be so. Rande Howell

The traders described in my book. The traders who post here. The traders who don't post here. They are all human beings working on their competencies, both technical and emotional, as a trader. And they are falllible. It is rare for a person to come to trading with a mind that is going to produce success in trading. No matter how successful they have been in other persuits. Trading requires a retraining from an urgency to act to create possibility (so useful in many endeavors) while trading requires the skill of patience to be developed so that the trade comes to the trader, so they don't chase the trade. There can be various reasons for this urgency bias. The system still has to be rebuilt for trading. And I work with a number of trader trainers who recognize that KNOW HOW is rarely enough. A mind has to drive that KNOW HOW. If you can train that with the simplicity you speak of here -- good for you. And if traders are not adults when they first get to trading, they sure will get the opportunity to grow into adult functioning with the dawn of every trading day. Rande Howell

Good luck with this line of reasoning. In mindfulness and the development of the Observing Self, people begin to realize that they and their thoughts, they and their beliefs are not the same. There is a witness to the coming and coming of thought and circumstance. It is awakening this faculty of our humanness that we have the tool needed to change the beliefs that are embedded into our circuitry. I see that happening all the time. It does require work and rigor with the self. Getting the mind opened has been happening for thousands of years. Rande Howell

I don't use the term ego in my work. The framework I use sees a self that has been organized by the brain in response to the environment in which it lives. From this point of view, the self can be fluid. And can be re-organized, incorporating more effective beliefs and biases about the nature of the environmnet around them. Traders are constantly projecting their beliefs about their capacity to manage uncertainty of life as they trade. The feedback loop is the trading account. It will show you how your current organization of self can manage ambiguity. It truly becomes a mirror into the self. And if you are going to be a student of trading, not incorporating feedback into the construction of the self is an act of self deception. I encourage people to read Douglas's work. He does a great job of describing what the trading mind needs to look like. The problem, always, is how do you build that mind. That is where my work is focused. BTW -- TL reposted this article from a while ago. My book has been out for at least 2 years. I was actually writing it when I posted this. Rande Howell

Good luck with this kind of reasoning. It is not freedom of emotion (much less suppressing them) that a trader needs for a successful trading mind -- it is freedom of emotion.. It is about the intelligent use of emotion that a trader needs to learn. Rande Howell

Even mechanical solutions are created by minds with biases in their understanding of how to manage uncertainty. Read my first response. The problem does not lie with them, but with you. You solve the problem of "you" and the assistant's contribution to the problem clears up -- one way or the other. Rande Howell

Look at what you have said here. And then look in the mirror. Who is hiring those "idiots". If you look there, rather than hold others responsible for your problems, you will be getting much closer to understanding the problem and how to solve it. Being born into a problem of immense wealth, and its induction into blindness, is part of the problem you will need to re-organize and solve. I wish you well. Bill Gates did his kids a favor by eliminating this pitfall. Rande Howell www.tradersstateofmind.com

Trading as a Second Career Most traders face years of struggling until they discover the need for self-development as part of their professional development. In the past, that gap has been expensive to cross. Trading as a Second Career changes this ineffective way of preparing yourself as a trader in a new profession. You are taught HOW to trade and HOW to develop the mind for success in trading together at the same time . Using a high probability trading system and developing the mind that uses that knowledge is not an option – it is a necessity. How Do You Integrate the Development of Knowledge-Based Trading with Preparing the Mind to Use that Knowledge Effectively in the Heat of Trading? NeverLossTrading and Traders State of Mind has developed a training program that does just that. And after you read this article, you are invited to attend a free webinar that explores how knowledge of trading and development of mind can be taught together to create a very powerful trading education for the trader who is serious about developing his/her career in trading. The training is a mentorship program that follows a step-by-step process, which combines the knowledge and education of NeverLossTrading®: Showing you how to spot and follow institutional money moves on multiple time frames with various assets. And Traders State of Mind: Teaching you emotional regulation to micro-manage your trader’s mindset and to learn how to emotionally prepare for specific moments in trading. Over the period of 10 weeks, each skill learned is folded into the next skill. BUILDING THE MIND OF A SUCCESSFUL TRADER Applying emotional regulation and peak performance training will pro-duce a dramatic impact on the trader's fortunes. Being successful and making money is integral to your survival for a trader. Many people out-side of trading can avoid the real work of transforming themselves -- traders (if they want to survive) cannot afford this deception. BUILDING THE KNOWLEDGE OF A SUCCESSFUL TRADER Institutions dominate more than 85% of the financial markets. NeverLoss-Trading® spots and paints institutional money moves right on your chart for you to follow. You will learn and apply multiple trading strategies in-cluding hedging and leveraging your positions. The private investor has one key advantage over institutions: Entire positions can be entered and exited immediately, outperforming institutional capabilities by far. KEY ELEMENTS OF TRADING AS A SECOND CAREER  Emotional Regulation  Mindfulness Action  Internal Dialogue Steering  Intentionally Trading  Build up Vigilance  Empower Yourself  Spotting Institutional Moves  Indicator-Based Trading  Day and Swing Trading  Specific Time Trading  Opportunity Scanning  Trade Execution and Review Mentorship Guideline and Curriculum for Trading as a Second Career NeverLossTrading Installation of the NLT Top-Line Indicators and Scanners on your computer by remote programming and your specifications. Joint chart reading, selection and execution of the first trades, fol-lowing institutional money moves. To receive real-time data connection, opening a free account with thinkorswim.com is needed. The NeverLossTrading software is a plug-in to thinkorswim. A change of brokers is not needed and most traders remain with the broker/software they are most familiar with to execute their trades. The trading system is applicable with IRA, Cash and Margin accounts. NeverLossTrading® Strategies Trading to the up- and downside with options or by combining shares with options: The NeverLossTrading Delta Force Concept. Learning and executing trade adjustment strategies, giving you the ability to turn potential losers into winners. Scanning for Opportunities: With the installed scanners, you will be able to run your own research, intraday and after market clo-sure: Check your favorite stocks, market segments. Learn how to scan in NLT selected segments: Intraday Trading: You are taught how to bring this new empow-ered state of mind to the uncertainties found in trading (and life). The challenges are still there, but the mind you bring to the challenges of uncertainty is now rooted in disciplined impartiality rather than fear of losing or fear of missing out. Decision making is not made from fear, but from calm, patient, disciplined, impartial mind. This is the Traders State of Mind. Trade Execution and Review: What went right, what went wrong, and how to repetitively do it right. You will experience and train on fast chart reading, trade execution and adjustment on multiple time frames for various asset classes: Stock, Commodities, Treasuries, Currencies. The session also includes trade examples of derivatives: Futures and Options. Specific Time Trading. How to trade at specific times of the day, month, year: Spot and follow institutional money moves by know-ing when they happen and if they got confirmed or not. Trade Reviews: Leaving no question un-answered. Upside opportunities. Downside opportunities. Key turning points. Price/Volume/Volatility relations. Traders State of Mind Emotional Regulation. You will learn about the nature of emotion and how to regulate the intensity of a negative emotion (fear and euphoria) so that the emotion no longer has the power to corrupt the quality of thinking required to trade in a peak performance state of mind. Specifically, you will be learning how to manage the triggering of the arousal component of an emotion (the cranking up of an emo-tion) so that the emotion does not become activated and contami-nate the quality of your thinking (and therefore your performance). This is accomplished through breath and relaxation training applied to the management of the biology of the emotion. Mindfulness. Regulation of an emotion, though necessary, is not enough to manage the mind of the trader. This is why the next step in the process of developing traders’ state of mind is the de-velopment of mindfulness or the observing self. Here you learn that you and your thoughts are not the same. And you and your beliefs are not the same. Locating the Historical Internal Dialog. With this new powerful tool of Mindfulness, you begin to examine the mind that trades. The first place that you learn to focus the lens of Mindfulness is on the current organization of your thought life. Intraday Trading: Focus of this session are sub-day time frames. You will experience how to trade reference time frames, how to catch trades which ran away from you, and how to trade favorable stocks and chart setups. Developing the Empowered Self. Now that you have a better un-derstanding of the mind that you brought to trading, you are then taught to discover other, much more empowered elements of the self and bring them into the forefront of your thinking mind and awareness. Intentionality. In the same way that a great baseball hitter practic-es a ritual that prepares him to be in hitter’s mind, you will now be taught how to create your own process for creating the mind that trades. Specific Time Trading. How to trade at specific times of the day, month, year: Spot and follow institutional money moves by know-ing when they happen and if they got confirmed or not. Vigilance. You are taught that Traders State of Mind is not some-thing that you achieve and no longer have to work with. In the same way that any performer has to maintain a practice to stay in the zone, you will also develop a practice that maintains the mind that you have built. The most dangerous thing to a successful trader is for him/her to become complacent. Mind has to be main-tained. Eternal Vigilance is the price of freedom. . NeverLossTrading® A Division of Nobel Living, LLC 401 E. Las Olas Blvd. - Suite 1400 Fort Lauderdale, FL 33301 Call: +1 866 455 4520 contact@NeverLossTrading.com Traders State of Mind Rande Howell 6047 Tyvola Glen Circle, Box 123 Charlotte, NC 28217 www.tradersstateofmind.com Building the Knowledge and Mind of a Successful Trader Your Trading Education Solution by Traders State of Mind & NeverLossTrading® Do you want to know more. There is a free webinar this coming week that explains this process to a much greater degree. You can learn more about "Trading as a Second Career" by either calling the number below or emailing the below address. Call: +1 866 455 4520 info@YourTradingCareer.com You can register for this webinar on June 26 by clicking here: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/367663656 Disclaimer Trading securities can have large potential rewards but also a large potential risk. Customers must consider all relevant risk factors, including their own personal financial situation before trading. All our materials are educational materials that are intended to help you develop trading skill sets involving emotional state management and higher functioning states of mind in the performance of trading. They do not guarantee success. They help develop the skills necessary to manage probability and uncertainty found in trading. In our teaching, in our newsletters, webinars, and all other publications, neither NOBEL Living, LLC, the parent company of NeverLossTrading® nor “Traders State of Mind”, nor any of the speakers, staff or members act as stockbrokers, broker dealers, or registered investment advisers. thinkorswim, Division of TD Ameritrade, Inc., and Nobel Living, LLC, the parent company of NeverLossTrading, are separate, unaffiliated companies and are not responsible for each other’s products and services.

A Common Scenario for Self-Sabotage This time it was going to be different for John. He was ready. His trading rules were etched on the back of his eye lids – burned into his memory. He knew the set-ups he was looking for, backwards and forwards, and he was only going to trade those set-ups. John knew how he was going to execute his trade. He knew how he was going to manage risk once he was in the trade. All he had to do was follow his rules and he was going to win his share of trades. He affirmed that he was a patient and disciplined trader. John saw success and could feel it. Prepared for battle, John turned on his computer, watched his screens light up, and saw the charts appear. He was ready to trade – to win. What happened after that is still a mystery to John. Somehow, despite his best intentions, he ended up taking a loss on a trade that was questionable at best. It certainly was not an “A” trade based on his trade criterion – which he swore was the only ones he would take. But there he was anyway. Then he took a loss. Everything after that is a blur to John. All he knows is that he somehow fell into self-destructive behaviors that led him into revenge-trading. Before the trading session ended, John (once again), had a losing day. And he really did not understand what had happened or how to stop it from happening again. He was rattled and was no longer the confident trader he had talked himself into being before he started trading earlier in the day. This scenario had been going on for way too long. He was so close (but so far away) from the success he wanted. He could smell it, taste it; but somehow he kept falling into a self-destructive spell and instead he kept pulling defeat out of the jaws of victory. A Closer Examination of Self-Sabotage Through Another Perspective What appears as a perplexing behavioral performance that is negative can, in fact, have positive intent when we examine how our biology, our DNA, and our mind weave reactive patterns together for survival in the short-term, which is exactly what our emotional brain has evolved to do. This short-term orientation toward survival problems, burned into our DNA, was never designed for the probability kind of thinking required of trading. Rather, it is designed to produce a belief in the certainty of survival in the short-term. It is this built-in bias that traders have to learn to work with and change if they are to tap into the potential that trading can offer. Self-destructive behavior in a particular domain (like trading) can be an initially positive behavior learned in another domain and time. This is called secondary gain. Avoidance of uncertainty (avoidance of threat) is a mandate for our brain's survival biases. Even attacking the "cause" of the uncertainty and threat is deeply burned into DNA because of its success over countless generations. When the attack or avoid motivations of an emotion create success (removal of threat) the behavior is considered a success to the prime directive of survival. And being successful in the short-term for survival, this confluence of emotion, cognition, and behavior becomes burned into neural memory and becomes habituated – just waiting to be triggered in the event of perceived threat. Here the plot against the maintenance of an effective trading mind thickens. After many reps of avoiding or attacking perceived threats in one domain (saying believing a saber tooth tiger is behind the bush) and wiring that learning into a highly charged circuit in the brain, the trader takes that learning into trading where uncertainty has to be managed by a higher order of thinking. Without training, the brain is going to reactively perceive the uncertainty of outcomes found in trading as a threat to be avoided or attacked. This is simply the biology of emotion overwhelming the capacity to maintain a probability-based mindset. Not being able to pull the trigger when all conditions are met is a form of learned avoidance. Revenge-trading, in particular, is a form of attack motivation the brain has learned where it is attempting to attack the perceived threat. Meanwhile, the mind of the trader has been hijacked by survival-based emotions. The trader takes a loss (a consequence of threat) and now (in this emotional-hijacking situation) reactively attacks the threat to get back what has been lost. And when this reaction is in full impulse, it is highly self-destructive within the context of trading. But when seen from the perspective of the survival-oriented emotional brain, what we call revenge trading is simply the emotional brain doing its best to help us fight for our survival. The emotional brain was developed to deal with circumstances from another time and place. It simply is incapable of understanding that there are no saber-toothed tigers threatening our survival anymore. It cannot “see” the probability of risk/reward from which the trading mind needs to act. After a trader has been burned a few times by emotional hijackings like these, a new condition arises where the amygdala (the seat of fear-based reactive thinking, or what I call "Orphan" in my work) does not trust the thinking brain to manage the situation and - BOOM -- the learned self-destructive circuits trigger and take over again...and again... and again. Learning to Deal with the Emotional Brain so the Trader Can Think Some traders learn to de-sensitize themselves over time and develop a mind that can think dispassionately as they trade. This is rare, but it is the lore of old-school trader trainers. Others continue to engage in self-destructive behaviors while steadfastly holding on to a belief that the answer can be found outside the self. Still others get out of trading because they don’t know how to change and they cannot take further losses. And, finally, others choose to retrain the brain for better performance. In the latter case, the trader has accepted that the brain he/she brought to trading (and the mind that emerges from it) is rarely the brain/mind that can manage the uncertainty and probability for successful trading. The first step along this path is an appreciation and understanding of how the brain, based on its primitive mandates discussed earlier, is emotional in nature and organizes the psychology of self, based on emotion and the perception of threat and short-term survival. Developing our Emotional Intelligence (EQ) becomes far more important than our knowledge-based thinking, our IQ. Knowledge and smartness are easily overwhelmed by emotion when in the heat of the moment – unless you have a well-trained mind. In the methods I teach, emotional regulation (learning how to manage the intensity of an emotion) is essential. Without learning how to regulate emotion, you can never get to the self-limiting beliefs held in your mind. The Structure of Mind So, from emotional regulation, knowledge of the mind (what makes you tick) becomes possible. And what you discover is that the mind is far more intricate than you first conceived. If the brain is a community of rival emotional programs that, over time, only a few programs dominate; then the mind is the space where these programs are given voice. The internal struggle you experience while trying to make sound trading decisions while in the heat of the moment is actually the rival programs "duking it out" for control of the mind. This is what you perceive as your "thoughts". And without a structure that allows you to understand the different players (all those emotional programs given voice in the mind) and their intentions, the trader is essentially blind to the forces that drive his or her perception. And out of that perception comes your trading performances. But understand, these thoughts that you believe represent “you” are not you. They are simply the voice of the emotional programs, burned into DNA, of the brain you brought into trading and that currently have control over your thinking. The composition of this mind is simply the organization of the self that your brain organized you into, to adapt you to the circumstance of your environment during your formative period. It is this organization that needs to be changed so that an effective trading mind can be developed. Essentially, you will need to re-organize the historical programs that became dominate before you began to wake up and realize that you can become captain of the forces at play in your mind. And when you do this, you begin to take responsibility for the mind that you bring to trading. There is no flawed self that you need to hide from others or from yourself. The “self” simply becomes the historical organization of self that you brought to trading. And, of course, it needs to be re-developed. To be released from the comfort zone that the brain has created, but that now has become a prison to your growth as a trader (and as a human being), you courageously embrace your history (simply accepting it as one possible organization of the self) and begin taking responsibility for the organization of the self that you can be. This is where the Trading Mind begins.

Why Self-Destructive Behaviors Persist: A Positive Attitude is No Match for Reactive Patterns A Common Scenario for Self-Sabotage This time it was going to be different for John. He was ready. His trading rules were etched on the back of his eye lids – burned into his memory. He knew the set-ups he was looking for, backwards and forwards, and he was only going to trade those set-ups. John knew how he was going to execute his trade. He knew how he was going to manage risk once he was in the trade. All he had to do was follow his rules and he was going to win his share of trades. He affirmed that he was a patient and disciplined trader. John saw success and could feel it. Prepared for battle, John turned on his computer, watched his screens light up, and saw the charts appear. He was ready to trade – to win. What happened after that is still a mystery to John. Somehow, despite his best intentions, he ended up taking a loss on a trade that was questionable at best. It certainly was not an “A” trade based on his trade criterion – which he swore was the only ones he would take. But there he was anyway. Then he took a loss. Everything after that is a blur to John. All he knows is that he somehow fell into self-destructive behaviors that led him into revenge-trading. Before the trading session ended, John (once again), had a losing day. And he really did not understand what had happened or how to stop it from happening again. He was rattled and was no longer the confident trader he had talked himself into being before he started trading earlier in the day. This scenario had been going on for way too long. He was so close (but so far away) from the success he wanted. He could smell it, taste it; but somehow he kept falling into a self-destructive spell and instead he kept pulling defeat out of the jaws of victory. A Closer Examination of Self-Sabotage Through Another Perspective What appears as a perplexing behavioral performance that is negative can, in fact, have positive intent when we examine how our biology, our DNA, and our mind weave reactive patterns together for survival in the short-term, which is exactly what our emotional brain has evolved to do. This short-term orientation toward survival problems, burned into our DNA, was never designed for the probability kind of thinking required of trading. Rather, it is designed to produce a belief in the certainty of survival in the short-term. It is this built-in bias that traders have to learn to work with and change if they are to tap into the potential that trading can offer. Self-destructive behavior in a particular domain (like trading) can be an initially positive behavior learned in another domain and time. This is called secondary gain. Avoidance of uncertainty (avoidance of threat) is a mandate for our brain's survival biases. Even attacking the "cause" of the uncertainty and threat is deeply burned into DNA because of its success over countless generations. When the attack or avoid motivations of an emotion create success (removal of threat) the behavior is considered a success to the prime directive of survival. And being successful in the short-term for survival, this confluence of emotion, cognition, and behavior becomes burned into neural memory and becomes habituated – just waiting to be triggered in the event of perceived threat. Here the plot against the maintenance of an effective trading mind thickens. After many reps of avoiding or attacking perceived threats in one domain (saying believing a saber tooth tiger is behind the bush) and wiring that learning into a highly charged circuit in the brain, the trader takes that learning into trading where uncertainty has to be managed by a higher order of thinking. Without training, the brain is going to reactively perceive the uncertainty of outcomes found in trading as a threat to be avoided or attacked. This is simply the biology of emotion overwhelming the capacity to maintain a probability-based mindset. Not being able to pull the trigger when all conditions are met is a form of learned avoidance. Revenge-trading, in particular, is a form of attack motivation the brain has learned where it is attempting to attack the perceived threat. Meanwhile, the mind of the trader has been hijacked by survival-based emotions. The trader takes a loss (a consequence of threat) and now (in this emotional-hijacking situation) reactively attacks the threat to get back what has been lost. And when this reaction is in full impulse, it is highly self-destructive within the context of trading. But when seen from the perspective of the survival-oriented emotional brain, what we call revenge trading is simply the emotional brain doing its best to help us fight for our survival. The emotional brain was developed to deal with circumstances from another time and place. It simply is incapable of understanding that there are no saber-toothed tigers threatening our survival anymore. It cannot “see” the probability of risk/reward from which the trading mind needs to act. After a trader has been burned a few times by emotional hijackings like these, a new condition arises where the amygdala (the seat of fear-based reactive thinking, or what I call "Orphan" in my work) does not trust the thinking brain to manage the situation and - BOOM -- the learned self-destructive circuits trigger and take over again...and again... and again. Learning to Deal with the Emotional Brain so the Trader Can Think Some traders learn to de-sensitize themselves over time and develop a mind that can think dispassionately as they trade. This is rare, but it is the lore of old-school trader trainers. Others continue to engage in self-destructive behaviors while steadfastly holding on to a belief that the answer can be found outside the self. Still others get out of trading because they don’t know how to change and they cannot take further losses. And, finally, others choose to retrain the brain for better performance. In the latter case, the trader has accepted that the brain he/she brought to trading (and the mind that emerges from it) is rarely the brain/mind that can manage the uncertainty and probability for successful trading. The first step along this path is an appreciation and understanding of how the brain, based on its primitive mandates discussed earlier, is emotional in nature and organizes the psychology of self, based on emotion and the perception of threat and short-term survival. Developing our Emotional Intelligence (EQ) becomes far more important than our knowledge-based thinking, our IQ. Knowledge and smartness are easily overwhelmed by emotion when in the heat of the moment – unless you have a well-trained mind. In the methods I teach, emotional regulation (learning how to manage the intensity of an emotion) is essential. Without learning how to regulate emotion, you can never get to the self-limiting beliefs held in your mind. The Structure of Mind So, from emotional regulation, knowledge of the mind (what makes you tick) becomes possible. And what you discover is that the mind is far more intricate than you first conceived. If the brain is a community of rival emotional programs that, over time, only a few programs dominate; then the mind is the space where these programs are given voice. The internal struggle you experience while trying to make sound trading decisions while in the heat of the moment is actually the rival programs "duking it out" for control of the mind. This is what you perceive as your "thoughts". And without a structure that allows you to understand the different players (all those emotional programs given voice in the mind) and their intentions, the trader is essentially blind to the forces that drive his or her perception. And out of that perception comes your trading performances. But understand, these thoughts that you believe represent “you” are not you. They are simply the voice of the emotional programs, burned into DNA, of the brain you brought into trading and that currently have control over your thinking. The composition of this mind is simply the organization of the self that your brain organized you into, to adapt you to the circumstance of your environment during your formative period. It is this organization that needs to be changed so that an effective trading mind can be developed. Essentially, you will need to re-organize the historical programs that became dominate before you began to wake up and realize that you can become captain of the forces at play in your mind. And when you do this, you begin to take responsibility for the mind that you bring to trading. There is no flawed self that you need to hide from others or from yourself. The “self” simply becomes the historical organization of self that you brought to trading. And, of course, it needs to be re-developed. To be released from the comfort zone that the brain has created, but that now has become a prison to your growth as a trader (and as a human being), you courageously embrace your history (simply accepting it as one possible organization of the self) and begin taking responsibility for the organization of the self that you can be. This is where the Trading Mind begins.

A Common Scenario for Self-Sabotage This time it was going to be different for John. He was ready. His trading rules were etched on the back of his eye lids – burned into his memory. He knew the set-ups he was looking for, backwards and forwards, and he was only going to trade those set-ups. John knew how he was going to execute his trade. He knew how he was going to manage risk once he was in the trade. All he had to do was follow his rules and he was going to win his share of trades. He affirmed that he was a patient and disciplined trader. John saw success and could feel it. Prepared for battle, John turned on his computer, watched his screens light up, and saw the charts appear. He was ready to trade – to win. What happened after that is still a mystery to John. Somehow, despite his best intentions, he ended up taking a loss on a trade that was questionable at best. It certainly was not an “A” trade based on his trade criterion – which he swore was the only ones he would take. But there he was anyway. Then he took a loss. Everything after that is a blur to John. All he knows is that he somehow fell into self-destructive behaviors that led him into revenge-trading. Before the trading session ended, John (once again), had a losing day. And he really did not understand what had happened or how to stop it from happening again. He was rattled and was no longer the confident trader he had talked himself into being before he started trading earlier in the day. This scenario had been going on for way too long. He was so close (but so far away) from the success he wanted. He could smell it, taste it; but somehow he kept falling into a self-destructive spell and instead he kept pulling defeat out of the jaws of victory. A Closer Examination of Self-Sabotage Through Another Perspective What appears as a perplexing behavioral performance that is negative can, in fact, have positive intent when we examine how our biology, our DNA, and our mind weave reactive patterns together for survival in the short-term, which is exactly what our emotional brain has evolved to do. This short-term orientation toward survival problems, burned into our DNA, was never designed for the probability kind of thinking required of trading. Rather, it is designed to produce a belief in the certainty of survival in the short-term. It is this built-in bias that traders have to learn to work with and change if they are to tap into the potential that trading can offer. Self-destructive behavior in a particular domain (like trading) can be an initially positive behavior learned in another domain and time. This is called secondary gain. Avoidance of uncertainty (avoidance of threat) is a mandate for our brain's survival biases. Even attacking the "cause" of the uncertainty and threat is deeply burned into DNA because of its success over countless generations. When the attack or avoid motivations of an emotion create success (removal of threat) the behavior is considered a success to the prime directive of survival. And being successful in the short-term for survival, this confluence of emotion, cognition, and behavior becomes burned into neural memory and becomes habituated – just waiting to be triggered in the event of perceived threat. Here the plot against the maintenance of an effective trading mind thickens. After many reps of avoiding or attacking perceived threats in one domain (saying believing a saber tooth tiger is behind the bush) and wiring that learning into a highly charged circuit in the brain, the trader takes that learning into trading where uncertainty has to be managed by a higher order of thinking. Without training, the brain is going to reactively perceive the uncertainty of outcomes found in trading as a threat to be avoided or attacked. This is simply the biology of emotion overwhelming the capacity to maintain a probability-based mindset. Not being able to pull the trigger when all conditions are met is a form of learned avoidance. Revenge-trading, in particular, is a form of attack motivation the brain has learned where it is attempting to attack the perceived threat. Meanwhile, the mind of the trader has been hijacked by survival-based emotions. The trader takes a loss (a consequence of threat) and now (in this emotional-hijacking situation) reactively attacks the threat to get back what has been lost. And when this reaction is in full impulse, it is highly self-destructive within the context of trading. But when seen from the perspective of the survival-oriented emotional brain, what we call revenge trading is simply the emotional brain doing its best to help us fight for our survival. The emotional brain was developed to deal with circumstances from another time and place. It simply is incapable of understanding that there are no saber-toothed tigers threatening our survival anymore. It cannot “see” the probability of risk/reward from which the trading mind needs to act. After a trader has been burned a few times by emotional hijackings like these, a new condition arises where the amygdala (the seat of fear-based reactive thinking, or what I call "Orphan" in my work) does not trust the thinking brain to manage the situation and - BOOM -- the learned self-destructive circuits trigger and take over again...and again... and again. Learning to Deal with the Emotional Brain so the Trader Can Think Some traders learn to de-sensitize themselves over time and develop a mind that can think dispassionately as they trade. This is rare, but it is the lore of old-school trader trainers. Others continue to engage in self-destructive behaviors while steadfastly holding on to a belief that the answer can be found outside the self. Still others get out of trading because they don’t know how to change and they cannot take further losses. And, finally, others choose to retrain the brain for better performance. In the latter case, the trader has accepted that the brain he/she brought to trading (and the mind that emerges from it) is rarely the brain/mind that can manage the uncertainty and probability for successful trading. The first step along this path is an appreciation and understanding of how the brain, based on its primitive mandates discussed earlier, is emotional in nature and organizes the psychology of self, based on emotion and the perception of threat and short-term survival. Developing our Emotional Intelligence (EQ) becomes far more important than our knowledge-based thinking, our IQ. Knowledge and smartness are easily overwhelmed by emotion when in the heat of the moment – unless you have a well-trained mind. In the methods I teach, emotional regulation (learning how to manage the intensity of an emotion) is essential. Without learning how to regulate emotion, you can never get to the self-limiting beliefs held in your mind. The Structure of Mind So, from emotional regulation, knowledge of the mind (what makes you tick) becomes possible. And what you discover is that the mind is far more intricate than you first conceived. If the brain is a community of rival emotional programs that, over time, only a few programs dominate; then the mind is the space where these programs are given voice. The internal struggle you experience while trying to make sound trading decisions while in the heat of the moment is actually the rival programs "duking it out" for control of the mind. This is what you perceive as your "thoughts". And without a structure that allows you to understand the different players (all those emotional programs given voice in the mind) and their intentions, the trader is essentially blind to the forces that drive his or her perception. And out of that perception comes your trading performances. But understand, these thoughts that you believe represent “you” are not you. They are simply the voice of the emotional programs, burned into DNA, of the brain you brought into trading and that currently have control over your thinking. The composition of this mind is simply the organization of the self that your brain organized you into, to adapt you to the circumstance of your environment during your formative period. It is this organization that needs to be changed so that an effective trading mind can be developed. Essentially, you will need to re-organize the historical programs that became dominate before you began to wake up and realize that you can become captain of the forces at play in your mind. And when you do this, you begin to take responsibility for the mind that you bring to trading. There is no flawed self that you need to hide from others or from yourself. The “self”simply becomes the historical organization of self that you brought to trading. And, of course, it needs to be re-developed. To be released from the comfort zone that the brain has created, but that now has become a prison to your growth as a trader (and as a human being), you courageously embrace your history (simply accepting it as one possible organization of the self) and begin taking responsibility for the organization of the self that you can be. This is where the Trading Mind begins. Rande Howell

Jeffrey As John Keating noted: Open Mind: Open Heart. Once you get beyond all the urban legend of what it takes to develop the mind for trading, you come to understand that changing mind is really more about changing heart. Rande

Self destructive behavior in a particular domain, say trading, can be an initially positive behavior learned in another domain and time. This is called secondary gain. Avoidance of uncertainty (avoidance of threat) is a mandate for our brain's survival biases. Even attacking the "cause" of the uncertainty and threat is a deeply burned into DNA because of its success over countless generations. When the attach or avoid motivations of an emotion do create success (removal of threat) the behavior is considered a success to the prime directive of survival. After many reps of avoiding or attacking perceived threats in one domain (saying believing a saber tooth tiger is behind the bush) and wiring that learning into a highly charged circuit in the brain, the trader takes that learning into trading where uncertainty has to be managed by higher order thinking. Without training, the brain is going to reactively perceive the uncertainty of outcomes found in trading as a threat to be avoided or attacked. Not being able to pull the trigger when all conditions are meet is a form of learned avoidance. Revenge trading, in particular, is a form of attack motivation the brain has learned where the brain is attempting to attack the perceived threat. And when in full impulse, it is highly self destructive. After a trader has been burned a few times by emotional hijackings like these, a new condition arises where the amygdala (fear based reactive thinking) does not trust the thinking brain to manage the situation, and boom -- the learned self destructive circuits trigger and take over again...again... and again. Some traders learn to desensitive themselves over time, other continue to engage in self destructive behaviors, other get out of trading, and other choose to retrain the brain for better performance. But the brain you bring to trading (and the mind that emerges from it) is rarely the brain/mind that can manage the uncertainty and probability for success trading. Rande Howell

There really does need to be an attitude adjustment in preparing the mind for trading. The mind needs to be focused on execution without focus on outcome. Many bring their notions of "need for success" into the trading mind as it executes in the moment of the trade. It's all about outcome at this point. Like you say, traders need to really examine their money narrative. Rande Howell

It is very common for traders, as they their mind where it needs to be, to really look at their methodology and realize there are problems in it that they had not seen before. Overall, I find very few traders come equipped with a mind suitable for trading -- it has to be built. The way I understand the structure of your training, you are doing this. Rande Howell

What mind do you bring to your trading day? Can you be specific about describing that mind? Have you intentionally organized your mind for the performance of trading centered in patient discipline? Is this carefully prepared mind rehearsed BEFORE you start your trade day so that you are emotionally and mentally fit for the rigors of the trade day? Or is preparing the mind for the performance of trading more of a hit and miss situation? And if you do bring an intentional mind to start your trading day, what happens to it once you begin your trading day? What is your plan to prepare the mind so that you maintain excellence of execution? Preparing the mind for the trade day is not a sprint where there is initially concentrated effort for a short duration. Rather, it is a marathon where the runner has to take stock of his faculties at various points in the race and manage them for the duration of a long race. As much as traders hear about how important emotional and mental attitude is in the performance of trading, very few traders actually manage the mind that trades as they move through the process of a trade. In the Traders State of Mind training programs I teach, a considerable amount of energy and training goes into preparing the mind for the trading day BEFORE the day starts. This becomes the foundation from which the trader learns to manage the mind WHILE he is in the process of trading. In order to achieve a calm, disciplined impartial mind from which to trade (the Traders State of Mind), a trader must be vigilant. This aspect of the management of the mind is focused on getting the brain and the mind ready to trade. Typically, preparation for the trading day begins the night before. And preparing the mind continues when the trader wakes up and before he gets out of bed. Then, always, a period of time is devoted to mental preparation and rehearsal that includes a prayer/meditation/centering period where the trader tunes his mind into the peak performance organization of self that is suitable for trading. It is here that the trader can volitionally construct a mind rooted in calm, disciplined impartiality. With his mind now calm and ready for trading, the trader starts his day. The earlier preparation readies the trader for the trading day so that he/she is fit to trade from a state of mind grounded in calm, disciplined authority. However, this is not enough. This calm, disciplined authority has to be maintained through the cycle of a trade. Now, let’s take a look at this cycle. Psychology and Process Conjoin All that preparation is washed away within a short period of time if the mind is not trained for the process of the trade. What I have found is that the early preparation stage of mental readiness is good for about 30 seconds to 30 minutes. This is where a particular psychology of performance needs to be integrated into your actual trade plan. Your trade plan and your psychological plan are not separate. Your mind is an integral part of the trading system. It is what drives your platform and methodology. So this driver has to be trained to drive his system proficiently. The following process represents critical stages while trading where you need to be psychologically prepared (trained) to manage the circumstance of the moment. Watching For Set-ups Many traders become immediately blinded by an insidious bias while in this stage. With an urgency to act, they approach their charts seeking set-ups. This very urgency to act contaminates the mind that is supposed to be patiently waiting for set-ups. Instead, believing that they have to be "doing something" to be trading, the skill of patience (necessary to wait for trades to come to them) is vaporized from the mindset in a flash and replaced with an urgency to trade. And, suddenly they are chasing trades that are dubious decisions at best. This bias gets them into trouble because it SETS THEM UP to take trades not in their trade plans or has higher risk to reward parameters than their trade plan dictates. Many a trader has done a good job of preparing the mind for the trade day, only to sabotage themselves at the beginning of the trading cycle due to this bias. Therefore, this point is critical to managing the psychology of the trading mind. Your job is to patiently wait for set-ups to come to you. Your job is not to make things happen. A Trade Warms Up Have you ever noticed what happens in your mind when you start seeing all the confirmation coming in as you watch a possible trade set up? The warmer the trade gets, the more an untrained performance psychology is tested or seduced. This is a moment to take pause and regulate your psychology so that, in your excitement, you do not get in early. Or, perhaps, in your anticipation (untrained performance mind) you keep seeking more and more confirmation until the trade potentiality is over. Is the mind that watches the set up calm, patient, and disciplined? If not, you need to train yourself to be. Trade Entry As you go to pull the trigger, what is your mental composition? Are you pulling at the bit to jump in (euphoria) or is your trigger finger paralyzed and incapable of clicking the mouse (hesitation)? This is a moment for which you must prepare. It is not a moment that is pushed aside until it cannot be ignored. All the "man-up"ing you can muster at this point is a dangerous exercise in futility if you have not developed the mind that is prepared for this moment. Order Confirmation When they hear that “cha-ching” of an order being filled, something dramatic happens in the mind of many a trader. They are now committed to the trade and there is no way out of it, except through it. Risk is real now and you could lose your money. This is where many traders start a downward spiral in their ability to manage a trade effectively. Their mind has not been organized to bring the proper elements together for trade management. Traders need to take a pause here and recollect themselves. They have now moved from looking for opportunities to exploit (offensive coordinator) to defending turf (defensive coordinator). It is at this moment that it is critical for the trader to reassert his performance psychology, or it is going to be a long ride down. In the Red There is nothing more unnerving for the evolving trader than to watch a trade in flux. The trade is bouncing around and spending a good bit of time in the red. You can see the red indicator light and can feel the fear and excitement. The mind starts really decompensating and the resolve to adherence to the trading plan is taking a beating. Preparing for this situation should be part of every trader’s practice. The trader must learn to regulate it, or the trader’s performance mind moves from focusing on execution to being fixated on losing capital. The trader’s job is to maintain the mind that is focused on the performance of execution. Yet, an emotional hijacking is underway. This is why this moment in trading needs to be anticipated and trained for. Otherwise, it keeps you from becoming the trader you could be. Taken Hostage by Marginal Profits This is one of the biggest moments that separates a scratch trader from a consistently profitable trader. If the trader has not managed the mind that manages the trade before this moment, there is a powerful urgency for him to take the profit early from the trade, while the trade is still profitable. Then when he cashes out and feels the temporary emotional relief, he watches the trades move to his targets – just like his trade plan outlined. The problem is that the trader’s emotional state has not been managed somewhere along the progression from trade entry, to being in the red while in the flux, to the moment of profitability. Any of these moments can become a signal that triggers the need for practicing emotional state management. Maintaining these critical trade management moments, to the trained mind, are planned for and practiced. The key emphasis here is training. The trader is taking the mind he prepared before trading began and reasserting it – anticipating these moments so that he is prepared for the stressful conditions of trade management. Exiting a Trade – Taking a Loss During the process that is being laid out here, the emphasis is on management of the mind that executes the trade – and not on whether you are winning or losing. If you manage the mind that trades so that you execute your trade plan from a peak performance state of mind, your methodology will take care of the winners and losers. Your job is to manage the mind that trades. The questions to ask when taking a loss are: (1) Was it a method mistake? (2) Was it a psychological mistake? Or (3) was it simply being on the wrong side of probability? If it is a method or psychological mistake, then you learn from the mistake (which is how the brain learns) rather than dwelling on the loss and deepening your fear of losing. If you don't learn from this, you bring this fear of loss into your next trade. And that contaminates the mind that trades. Exiting a Trade – Winning One of the most dangerous things that a trader can do is to get excited by a win while he is still trading. (After your trade day is over is the time to celebrate the win.) While trading, the thinking mind is greatly influenced by the emotional state that you bring to the act of trading – particularly to the evaluation of set ups. When you feel good, you are bringing a mind fed by euphoria into the evaluation of set ups. And euphoria will cause you to believe with certainty that the good times are going to roll and then you no longer can evaluate your trading risk effectively. When you win in trading, the calm, disciplined impartiality you worked to achieve before you started trading is maintained by regulating your emotions and mind. Until the calm, disciplined impartiality is re-established, you are not fit to trade with a mind designed for trading success. Reviewing Your Trades Particular emphasis and attention needs to be placed on the mind with which you review your trade day. Are you beating yourself up for the mistakes you made or the lost opportunities you now see in your charts and performance? Or are you acting as a kind, wise teacher to yourself? The latter creates an emotional space for learning to occur while the former creates an emotional vortex that keeps emotional reactivity at the forefront and compromises the capacity for learning Toward a Peak Performance State of Mind This is the work of the inner game of trading. Once you establish a process that brings forward into your working mind a peak performance state for trading (calm, disciplined impartiality), then you can begin to practice it in these specific moments in the trading cycle. The mind you brought to trading is simply not going to be the mind that is going to produce success in trading. The whole notion of winning has to change. Success in trading is not about winning (or losing for that matter). It is about the psychology you bring to execution. It is about the mind that you bring to the performance of trading, so that you execute the trade with excellence. There is no "need to be right" about the trade, only its execution. If you do this, your methodology will take care of the winners and losers – and the money in your trading account.

Men have to deal with testosterone (that man-up thing) whereas women don't feel possessed by having to prove their womanhood as men often do. Testosterone, left to its own devices, will cause men to minimize risk in their thinking. However, they "feel" sure of themselves. Getting that under control with a dose of humbleness is really important in a man's trading constitution. Women, on the other hand, will often leave their perfectly fine analysis on the sideline and follow the trading advice of a man even when she feels she knows better. She is not sure of her confidence (that men are often full of) Both have work to do in managing predisposition. It would be interesting to get an eunuch's take on this.... Rande

This is interesting. First, this article addresses a particular subset of people who come into trading. People who have already experienced success in a past career. That's different from other subsets of people who enter trading with very different "stuff". Also, thought I was answering so that I would have multiple responses to your comments, but they are in your responces. Sorry about that. Rande

Thank you for your candor. The length of time you invested in getting the elements of success functioning in your trading is about right. It takes about that long for people to work through the blue sky and get to the business of training a mind to work in probabilties rather than certainties. There are very serious industry breakdowns in the way aspiring traders are taught that create enormous damage to people and to the future of this industry. You are right, crazy stuff is taught to people who, in their ignorance, blow up significant capital. You are right, there is no shortcut. Yet, if the transition to a 2nd career is taught from another perspective, there would be less bloodshed and more survivers. A new possibility is rising where career self development is taught right along side the trader training. The trader is brought along as a whole rather the piece meal way it is taught now. This is an approach that is being explored by a number of trader trainers and me. The major point is that the trader has to learn that their notion of work and success training have to be adapted from the model that brought them success BEFORE trading is re-learned so that new notions of work and success can be applied to the mind that trades. In the coming months, several training programs using this model will be coming out. Thank you jwdodge01 for your real life example. Trading does require a very different kind of business plan than folks are used to coming from other disciplines. Rande Howell

Adaptation is very different than character. Many people I've worked with have created strong career and business success before they got into trading. Clearly they have demostrated discipline, courage, and clear thinking in those domains. The problem lies (as I see it) in the generalization of those skills into trading and their application for trading. Overcoming years of training to create a sense of urgency and to act is a shock to the mind that has been organized around success in other domains. That kind of mind simply does not work well in trading. Particularly responses to fear. It takes re-training. Most bring their "stuff" into trading (arrested development) and this needs to be healed and transformed into new, higher functioning adapatations. I just don't see much character flaws. I so see alot of ignorance though -- believing that trading can be learned without examining the beliefs the trader holds about their capacity to manage uncertainty. I also hold that we "see" what we project upon the world. We never see the "world as it really is" Trading and self development for trading should be taught alongside each other. Much less suffering would occur if trainer acknowledged that the mind needs to be developed to produce the competency of trading as a career. But it is real easy to blame the student than to see a flaw in the way trading is taught. Rande Howell