Can Trading Profit and Trading Fear go Hand in Hand?
Fear can be a rather useful emotion, and in many cases fear prevents us from doing things that are otherwise unhealthy for us in one way or another. Fear can also be a great inhibitor. While fear is a naturally occurring emotion in nearly every creature imaginable, fear doesn’t often have much place in the market. Traders who execute based on fear often do not well at all. While fear is one of those helpful emotions when we consider taking a leap from blind decisions, fear often clouds the mind’s ability to break through the barriers it creates in order to get down to the elements that decisions should be based on.
For some traders, fear serves as a guidance tools. Season traders can use their fear to investigate further into a possible trade, especially when they don’t often feel intense feelings of fear. Novice traders can use their fears to prevent potentially disastrous trades. So where does fear fit in on the scale of useful emotions for traders?
Fear does not allow for firm and rational decision making. When you introduce fear into the equation, all of the information may line up that indicates a perfect trade. But yet you’re afraid. Do you go ahead with the trade or do you listen to your fear and pass on it for some unknown reason?
Before you can even begin to decide your next move, you need to understand some things about your fear. Like are you always afraid whenever you’re about to execute a trade? Some traders hang onto their fear for years before realizing how heavily it impacts their ability to make strong and rational decisions. Are you fearful because this is the largest trade you’ve ever executed?
Are you afraid because you are dabbling in the kitty for your kids’ college education? Digging into the root of your fear can help determine whether or not you should listen to it, move past it, or find another way to handle it. If you are perpetually fearful, then you need to find another way to deal with your fear, and shed it. Your fear, when it is always present, is like swimming the English Channel in a burlap sack. It just doesn’t offer you anything constructive and beyond that, it threatens to take you down.
Fear can be healthy. If you are suddenly fearful because you are pulling money out of your kids’ college fund in order to execute this trade, then that should be telling you something. If the rule of thumb is that you only use money you can afford to lose, perhaps your fear is telling you that breaking the rules isn’t something that you can be comfortable with.
If you’re fearful because of the size of the trade, you have two choices. You can break it down and execute a smaller trade, or you can bite the bullet and push through your fears and into the land of the high roller. While you should never do anything that would prevent you from getting a good night’s sleep, when you are hitting a growth period as a trader, you are bound to have to revisit the issues regarding fear. Growing as a trader can be scary, especially when you start off with larger trades or trades that carry a greater risk.
When you start really digging down to uncover your fears, the source can often tell you whether or not your fears are a hindrance or are preventing you from making a fairly regrettable error in judgment. Fear is not always a bad thing, but it is necessary to understand it in order to be effective either because of it or in spite of it.
Fears that you experience may not always be directly related to the trade, the source of the money, or whether there is an underlying cause. In some cases, traders who are on the verge of a great success become fearful because they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they became too successful. In other cases, traders become fearful because they haven’t learned to trust their judgment or to do their due diligence properly so they feel as though they are always guessing.
Uncovering the base of any fear takes strategic and deliberate strategy, much like investing itself. If you want to understand where your fears come from, you often have to dig down a few layers deep in order to find the original source of the fear. Finding that original source can allow you to let go of it. Sometimes, you just need to let the fear be there, name it, and move through it. Only you can tell how far you need to or are willing to go when searching out the fears you hold. We all have them. How much we allow them to interfere in our daily trades is ultimately up to each and every one of us.
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