Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Revenge trading part II

Once upon a time way back when... like maybe 2-3 years ago I wrote a piece here about my issues with revenge trading. As you may or may not recall I would get really pissed off after a losing trade or two and then let Stupid take over my trading. Stupid would do things like double or triple the amount of contracts and would take trades that were no were near being a setup all in the attempt to make back the small losses. Well, lets say that 9 times out of 10 this would result in a much larger loss and of course the 1 out of 10 times it would actually work would just reinforce how great a trader Stupid actually wasn't.

Although this problem has been there from day 1 I have made progress over the years. I finally stopped doing this to the extent that it would blow up my account on a regular basis. My accounts would only blow up on a semi regular basis. Real progress.

I have been working on the premise for the last 6 months that it was fear that was causing such behavior... fear of failure. For 6 months I have been doing psych work and exercises to solve this problem but to no avail. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results. I decided that I have been insane for 6 months. Then I had a revelation... I was wrong once again........ So I decided to do something different.

I figured that if FEAR wasn't feeding STUPID that it had to be something else. My other choice was GREED and EGO. These two were working together with STUPID! The dynamic evil trio was at large. Ego was the main culprit. Now I had a problem to solve. At least I had some ammo to shoot at it this time.

I have learned several different methods of dealing with psych issues in the last few months at a few different seminars and I started with parts negotiations as my first line of attack followed up by more Centerpointe Holosync. Let me back track first.

Holosync is the reason I believe that I was finally able to figure out that ego was the issue. It is a great program that uses low frequency sounds wave via music to stimulate cross brain communications. It helps your subconscious communicate with your self. It was during one of these sessions of listening while thinking about this problem that ego came up. I try to do this daily for continued improvement.

Parts negotiation is basically splitting parts of your personality into parts, then identifying the one (ones) that are causing problems and then negotiation with those parts to stop the behavior for a reward. I told ego that I understood he didn't like being wrong but by getting angry like a child was not way to help me. It was causing me to lose money. So what ego and I came to an agreement to do was that he would not interfere with my trading, and let me make money so that I could buy something that he thinks is really cool. Something that would feed him like an L-29 Cord. It's a really cool old car for those of you that have no idea. Ego really likes cool cars cause then ego thinks he is cool you see. You can't buy cool cars without cold hard cash! So he said he would stay out of trading for that reward. Simple.

Since I have done this and reinforced it, ego hasn't cause one problem and I have had 2 weeks of money making days every day. I just need to stay focused to make sure ego doesn't creep up again while watching all the other parts of my ego.

Works so far......

Trader X

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