6 Trading Psychology Fixes: Jared Tendler Q&A

Jared:

There are two sides to this, 1) Training, 2) Removing the flaws preventing you from fully adopting a probabilistic perspective.

I’m assuming at this point in your trading career that you have a robust understanding of the nature of trading, and of the probabilities in your trading style, system, or strategy. You might simply need more reps to deepen that understanding.

Think of the skill difference between being a teenager behind the wheel of the car and someone who’s been driving for 10+ years. When you’re first learning, you can understand what to do, but it takes a lot more experience to be able to respond to the various driving situations, both normal and abnormal, with ease.

You may just need more reps, and generally traders underestimate how much experience is required to train aspect of their trading knowledge to the level of mastery.

The other side – removing flaws, will be more obvious if you feel like your probabilistic perspective has plateaued and isn’t getting stronger month over month. Then, you’ll need to use the Mental Hand History to analyze the deeper flaw blocking you.

Commonly, I find high expectations, perfectionism, an illusion of control, hatred of variance, and wishing when working with clients on this problem. Find the one that applies to you, and then in moments when your mind rejects the probabilities – like when you expect a trade to win – then use the correction you found to both correct that flaw and train your probabilistic perspective.

Jared:

Remember, emotional control is not a solution it’s a tactic that you use to eventually achieve resolution – where your emotional reaction, FOMO, revenge, greed, overconfidence, fear, etc., are gone.

Controlled trading means to me that your mental game strategy isn’t strong enough yet. If you’re falling back into old bad habits, your C-game hasn’t moved forward and that’s likely because you haven’t identified the flaws, biases, or wishes impairing your judgment/execution.

You can control these for only so long before your mind breaks down. Eventually, like a pressure cooker, the intensity rises to a level that the mind can no longer control. This is a fundamental reality of how the brain is wired.

That’s why my system is designed to achieve resolution, so you don’t have to rely on emotional control long term.

Jared:

I suspect that if you’re asking this question and you’ve done the work that I’ve prescribed in the Masterclass – by journalling and completing Mental Hand Histories at the end of the trading day – that you’ve either not gotten to the root of your costly emotions, or you’ve got some scar tissue from past trading losses, failures, or blow-ups.

If you haven’t identified the root cause of your emotions, don’t despair, it can be hard. But you also shouldn’t give up trying. Keep at it, use the content in the Masterclass to identify one of the many flaws that I describe.

Jared:

When you say “overwhelmed with confidence” you’re overconfident. Which means you’re in a state of mind that is less aware of consequence or risk, and expects to win, not lose.

This is an emotional problem that you can use the system that I lay out in the Masterclass to correct – Map Your Pattern, Get to the Root of Your Problem, & Correct Your Problem. All of which are modules you can follow and I walk you through step-by-step what to do.

Jared:

Since you didn’t mention the application of what you’ve found in your Real-Time Strategy, I worry you’re trying to be too perfect in your work, and not focusing enough on the application of what you’ve found.

The question you’re asking is determined by whether you’re making progress when trying to manage and correct your problems in real time, during the trading day. If your Injecting Logic Statements are working, then you’ve gotten deep enough.

If not, first consider if you know them well enough to make an impact – in other words, is your ax sharp? If it is, and you’re not seeing any reduction in emotion or increase in execution, then it’s worth going deeper.

Jared:

Having big aspirational goals is a great way to keep you fired up. For some traders those big goals naturally lead them to do what they need to day-to-day to reach their goals.

For others, and it sounds like you’re in this category, you “know” what you need to do, but you’re better when there’s absolute clarity.

So short answer is yes, making your goals bite size gives you tangible things to reach for daily, weekly or monthly, all in the service of the big result goals you’re after long term. This also gives you a way of measuring progress and staying motivated through the natural ups and downs in PnL.