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Best Trading Psychology course for dealing with Tilt and Revenge trading
Hi everyone , my first post here , but one that I need lots of help with .. Can anyone recommend a course etc that they have had personal experience and success with , that helps with trading emotions involving "tilting" and revenge trading? These emotions are worse for me than ever now , and when they kick in, I no longer can clearly see the charts , but instead get very focused only on my trading dome , and start clicking trades back to back .. I keep telling myself just one more stop out and I'm done for the day , but find it then impossible to walk away , and instead just get right back into taking more losing trades , trying to recover what I have already lost .. And that rarely works out .. Margin calls hurt, lol
I totally empathize with you as all traders have perhaps undergone this emotional state before. As revenge trading is the biggest bane to one's account, i personally feel it is just as important to spend some effort to analyze this as much as to how we analyze the markets. I can't specifically recommend any courses but a few links/ideas which have definitely helped along the way.
1. Fight or flight response - As long as we humans have the basal ganglia in our brain, we will have the reptilian complex and a fight or flight response. As a trader, when the acute pain stacks up, the loss aversion in us is triggered and an emotional response to get out of these losses is just an automatic response. Recognizing and accepting this as a natural reaction was a first step to the problem.
2. Prospect Theory - Behavioral Finance: Key Concepts - Prospect Theory | Investopedia
To pick out the relevant parts, the theory puts forth we all have place a higher emphasis on losses more than gains. What this mean't was that the revenge trading triggers could be not only caused by losses but also drawdowns from equity highs. If a trader reached $1000 in a trading day but ended up with $500 he would be dissatisfied although a 500 gain although it was profitable and exactly the same percentage as the 500 drawdown he experienced.
3. Recognizing all the triggers - Once it made sense to how emotionally susceptible we all are under stress, I worked my way through to establish the emotional thresholds or uncle points for both gd or bad trades. Trading pain is inevitable as we are forever in a drawdown but analyzing at which point we go on tilt is crucial and to set the thresholds way below them to avoid the 'heat' which leads to tilt. I also recognized other subtle things such as too many market ladders/news had an adverse feedback loop causing over stimuli picking up unnecessary trades before revenge trading.
4. Forming the emotional plan - As important as it is to form the trading plan, I found it equally as important to establish a plan to identify all the emotions associated with trading be it pain from losses, pain from drawdowns, boredom and over excitement. The concepts are fuzzy in nature as each trader will have different experiences or triggers but it definitely helps to identify them and form a plan to work with and not around these emotions.
5. Changing the mental framework - Lastly, I wanted to add this which I felt would be most important after all that was in place. All the points above would be moot without a trading process/plan/strategy to adhere to. With that in place, one can validate the days success by changing the minds focus from working to have a good trading day to commitment to following the trading process.
I would recommend something different, although having read Van Tharp and Steenbarger, they too are very helpful.
But to get to real root of issues you need to be aware/mindful of what is happening at the time. So here is what I recommend. A very inexpensive and powerful book:
Substitute 'While Trading' for 'in a Frantic World' and you should get the idea. Not easy to maintain the discipline to move into regular mindfulness meditation, but as you know, nothing of value can be got for little effort. And that includes trading too of course.
Good luck.
Update: Just got this blog post link in my email from a UK based trader. Deals with same topic and worth a read. The guy is also an NLP practitioner so other useful articles on his blog:
you might also find this post useful: Your Inner Monkey | FuturesTrader71
Your emotional reaction to losses is important, this means being aware of the emotions and not trying to suppress them. When you know the feeling, you can recognize it and if you tend to do "stupid" things while you have the feeling it's much easier to walk away from the screen for example when you are able to detect the feeling kicking in.
Also finding out if you are risk averse or risk seeking can help you develop your trading plan accordingly.