Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Forex, The Mind, and Success

By Bart Icles

Your forex trading day starts as soon as you wake up. The things that happen before you sit down at the computer effect who you are and how you think. Forex trading is a mind exercise every time you trade.

Every time you sit down to trade you are going to try and overcome yourself. You are going to fight the things (good or bad) that happened that day. For instance if you had a great day at work, extremely fulfilling and made a lot of progress, you may sit down to trading and feel invincible. However if you had a horrible day with your family, a fight with your kids or something you will sit down to trade and be emotionally drawn to specific trades that you normally may not do.

One way to overcome these daily fluctuations of emotion is to schedule in 5 minutes before you start trading to just study a forex topic, read a forex article or forex blog. This time will allow your mind to take the time it needs to focus in on the new task at hand. Your mind likes to process, think about and review the daily happenings of life. Before you trade you have to get your mind to settle in on process, think about and review forex trading. These 5 minutes may change the way you trade.

A second way to overcome this struggle of dealing with daily events is to review your trading plan. This is similar to taking 5 minutes to read an article but instead of just focusing in on trading in general you are focusing your mind into what is about to happen. Review your plan and all the points within it. Look for particular things within your plan and your trading rules that you may struggle to follow and when identify those points that you may struggle with you will better be able to fight them.

A Third way is trade mental for a few minutes before diving in. Imagine in your mind possible scenarios that will happen and what your reaction needs to be. Imagine a variety of scenarios both bad and good and imagine a variety of responses. This is a very powerful strategy because it takes complete focus of your mind to carry these scenarios out.

Controlling your mind will improve your trading because you will be focused. Focus in forex is a powerful thing because it will bring up epiphanies, new insights and ideas. Take the time to train your mind to focus and track your progress since you started these exercises to see if they have helped.

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