Maintaining the correct mindset is one of the most important factors for successful traders. Understanding how to improve trading psychology can help minimize the impact of emotions and biases during market trading to the greatest extent possible.

What is trading psychology?

Trading psychology refers to the mindset of traders in the market. It can determine the extent of their successful profit-making and also provide explanations for why traders suffer significant losses. Innate human characteristics such as biases and emotions play a key role in trading psychology. The main focus of learning trading psychology is to be aware of the various pitfalls associated with negative psychological traits and to develop more positive characteristics. Traders who are proficient in trading psychology usually do not act on biases or emotions. As a result, they have a greater chance of making money in the market or, at least, minimizing losses.

Each trader's trading psychology is different because it is influenced by each person's own emotions and pre-existing biases. Some emotions that affect trading are:

Happiness

Impatience

Anger

FearPride

How to Improve Your Trading Psychology

Becoming aware of your emotions, biases, and personality traits is the easiest way to achieve an improvement in trading psychology. Once you have identified these, you can devise a trading plan that takes these factors into account, aiming to mitigate the potential impact they may have on your decision-making.

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For instance, if you are a naturally confident person, you might find that overconfidence and ego can hinder your decision-making. For example, you might let losses run in the hope that the market will turn in your favor, rather than incurring a small loss for your trading account. This can lead to greater losses or ultimately result in the collapse of your trading account.

To address this issue, you can use stop-loss orders to minimize losses and decide when to close a specific trade before opening a position. By doing so, you have acknowledged your biases and emotions because you consciously decide not to act on them but instead take measures to counteract them.

How Do Biases Affect Trading?

By definition, biases affect trading because they are preconceived personal inclinations favoring one thing over another. Consequently, they may impair your decision-making in the market as they can cloud your judgment and lead you to act on intuition rather than conducting rational fundamental or technical analysis.

This is because trading biases mean you are more likely to trade assets that have been successful in the past or to avoid assets that have incurred historical losses. It is important for traders to be aware of their conscious biases, as this can help them overcome these biases and approach the market with a more rational and planned way of thinking.

There are five main types of biases:Representing bias means that you will persist in or be more inclined to replicate previously successful trades. You may be able to do this without analyzing each of these trades, as they have brought you returns in the past. However, it is important to make each trade based on its own merits rather than historical success, even if two trades appear very similar.

Negative bias makes you more inclined to focus only on the negative aspects of a trade, rather than acknowledging what is right. In fact, this may mean that you give up an entire strategy just because it requires a slight adjustment to be profitable.

Status quo bias means that you will continue to use old strategies or trades instead of exploring new ones—you will stick to the status quo. Danger arises when you cannot assess whether those old methods are still viable in the current market.

Confirmation bias is when you seek out or value news and analysis that confirms your preconceived notions. It can also be that you do not seek out or ignore information that disproves your convictions.

The gambler's fallacy is the belief that because an asset has been increasing, it will continue to do so. There is no reason to believe this should be the case, just as there is no reason for a coin to land tails up rather than heads after it has done so several times in a row.

7 Tips to Avoid Emotional Trading:

1. Identify your personality traits.

2. Develop and follow a trading plan.

3. Be patient.

4. Be adaptable.Take a Break After a Loss

Accept Your Bonus

Keep Trading Records

Identify Your Personality Traits

One of the keys to developing a successful trading psychology is to identify your personality traits as early as possible. You will need to be honest with yourself and admit whether you have a tendency to be impulsive, or whether you are prone to act out of anger or frustration.

In such cases, it is important to keep these traits in check when actively trading, as they can lead you to make hasty and unwise decisions that lack analytical support. However, it is also important to leverage your personal strengths. For instance, if you are naturally calm and organized, you can use these personality traits to your advantage during market hours.

As mentioned above, identifying and understanding your own character traits and emotions is equally important, which is about recognizing your biases. Biases are inherent in human nature, but you should understand your biases before starting or ending any trade.

Develop and Follow a Trading Plan

Creating a trading plan is crucial for ensuring that you achieve your goals. A trading plan is the blueprint for your trading activities, highlighting your time commitment, available trading capital, risk-reward ratios, and the trading strategies you deem appropriate.

For example, a trading plan might state that you intend to spend an hour trading in the morning and evening each day, and that you will never risk more than 2% of your portfolio's total value on any single trade. This can help to minimize losses and limit the impact of emotions on your trading, as it has already outlined the rules for entering or exiting positions.A trading plan should also take into account various factors that may affect your trading discipline, such as your emotions, biases, and personality traits. If you identify your biases before you start trading, you may be less likely to act on them.

Patience

Patience is a crucial component of discipline and is vital to your positions. Acting on emotions such as fear can lead to prematurely closing positions and missing out on profits. Trust your analysis and maintain patience and discipline. Similarly, when seeking trades, it's important to be patient and wait for the right moment rather than jumping in at random. For instance, if you're looking to speculate on certain GBP currency pairs, such as EUR/GBP or GBP/USD, you might want to wait until before the Bank of England (BoE) announces, as volatility tends to increase at such times.

Adaptability

While having a trading plan is important, remember that no two days in the market are the same, and there is no winning streak in trading. With this in mind, you should get accustomed to assessing the daily differences in the market and making corresponding adjustments.

If the volatility on a particular day is higher than the previous day, and the market's movements are especially unpredictable, you may decide to pause your trading activities until you feel you understand what is happening. Adaptability can help limit emotions, eliminate biases that represent and maintain the status quo, allowing you to assess each situation based on your circumstances, ensuring that you remain pragmatic in the market.

Take a Break After a Loss

Sometimes, the best thing you can do after a loss is to step away from your trading account for a little while to collect your thoughts and prepare yourself—rather than jumping into another trade in an attempt to recoup some of your losses.

The best traders are those who take losses in stride and use them as learning opportunities. They typically take a few minutes to step back from their platform, using this time to assess what went wrong with a particular trade, hoping to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

By doing so, they can maintain their composure and stay cool-headed, ensuring that they approach their trades with a clear and focused mind.Accepting Your Bonus

Just as important as taking a break after a loss is resigning and receiving a bonus on the path forward. A string of victories or a particularly large win can make you feel invincible, after which you might hastily turn to trying another method.

You might even open a series of new positions, thinking they won't fail because it's a "day" in the market. This could lead you to take unnecessary risks or diversify your portfolio too quickly without analyzing each corresponding market.

When you are in a happy spell in the market, happiness is as dangerous as anger, so it's important to recognize when it might impair your decision-making or could have a negative impact on your trading psychology.

Keeping a Trading Journal

A trading journal will allow you to record all losses and wins, as well as the emotions you experienced during specific trades. As a result, it is a summary of all the points mentioned earlier in this article and can be used to assess whether the decisions you made at any time were good decisions.

For instance, a trading journal can be used to document the times you chose to cut your losses and the final price the asset reached. This way, you can review whether you made the right decision. Similarly, it can be used to record the times you accepted bonuses and whether your emotions decided to close positions too early or too late.

Trading Psychology Summary

Trading psychology is related to your mindset in the market, and it can provide explanations for your gains and losses.

It's important for you to understand your weaknesses and biases before entering a position, but equally important is that you should understand your strengths.Learn from victories, learn from losses, but remember, there are no winning streaks in trading; assess each position based on your own circumstances.

Knowing when to take profits or cut losses can be the difference between good days and bad days in the market.

Keep a trading journal as a record to review what worked, what didn't, and to retrospect whether your decisions at the time were correct. Use this information to improve your future decision-making.