Picking up, Moving Forward, and Recovering from Bad Moments in Trading

Bad moments in trading are inevitable. Whether you got blindsided by some bad news or you just lost when you were rather confident you were going to win or you just feel generally unsettled because you have too much weighing on you, there are bound to be a great many bad moments. Sometimes a day is so littered with bad moments that we call it a bad day. Either way, the longer you opt to linger in a bad moment the more damage you choose to allow it to do to your day.

You can't help how you feel? While that is debatable, there are things you can do to change your time around quickly and lose very little time in the process. The longer you hang out in your bad trading day the longer you are making sure you aren't moving forward.

We are all our own greatest enemy and we all have a negative self talk CD skipping around in our minds. When we start to suffer the consequences of a bad decision or a bad trading day starts to creep in, we have the option of going directly to the end game. Going to the end game often includes negative self talk in the global sense.

Telling yourself things like you are failing, listening to the criticism you received when you first decided to trade, and wondering what the point is since you just can't do this anyway is all defeating the end game way before you ever get there. There is no point in such negative self talk. If you are interested in making sure that you are failing, this is a great way to proceed. If there is even a tiny part of you that wants to be successful then you really need to reevaluate the thoughts in your head.

No matter what we do in this life, we all need to develop coping skills. Some are healthy while others are not quite so healthy. Whatever your coping skills, develop a few that can bring you back into a reasonable mind frame if not a positive one. Some days, reasonable is the best we get. Some traders take a moment to meditate or daydream, focusing on what they want out of life first before returning to their trades. Ten minutes of playing in your mind can give you the boost you need to tell yourself that it is time to crawl back up on the horse and get on with it.

Other traders take five minutes and write it out, determining exactly what trade it was that put them in a foul mood (or the personal event or whatever trigger started the process) and then return with a more positive outlook. Others hold onto a memento because it brings them back to their own reality of what they want out of this whole deal. Whatever works for you is fine, provided it doesn't involve self harm, self destruction, or the harm of someone else, as long as it puts you back on the right track.

Getting back on the right track can be difficult. It can seem easier to sit there in your world of self pity and self resentment. When we are miserable about something, we are often miserable to the core and changing our state of mind feels like too much effort. Is it too much effort to fabricate about $5,000 out of thin air? Traders in a depressed or pessimistic state of mind lose about (on average) $5,000 per trade made in such a state of mind. If that doesn't help to motivate you into putting your own effort into getting yourself back on the right track, then perhaps you can find another motivator. But we all need a reason to do something risky, hard, or profitable.

Picking yourself up from a bad moment will get easier over time provided that you stick with a coping skill that works well for you. You can't trade well when you are pessimistic. Your negative self talk is costing you a fortune. Fortunately, you are the only one who can change the things you tell yourself.

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