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A lot of traders think that the biggest problem is strategy. But more often than not, the real problem is emotion.
Explore how trading psychology and emotional management impact trading success beyond strategy in Market Mechanics Ep 22 with Brad Goh.
Key Takeaways
- Trading success depends more on managing emotions than on strategy alone.
- Unconscious programming drives most trading behaviors and must be reprogrammed.
- Recognizing and understanding emotional triggers is essential to break losing cycles.
- Practical emotional management techniques improve execution and profitability.
- Consistent results come from disciplined execution and mindset transformation.
What the video covers
- Most traders fail due to emotional and subconscious programming, not strategy flaws.
- Emotions like fear, doubt, FOMO, anger, and frustration disrupt trading execution.
- Paradigms shape how traders perceive the market and influence their decisions.
- Subconscious habits and beliefs drive 95% of daily trading actions on autopilot.
- Changing trading results requires reprogramming the nervous system and mindset.
- Carl Jung’s quote highlights the need to make unconscious patterns conscious to change outcomes.
- Each trading emotion follows a cycle that causes repeated mistakes and losses.
- Brad Goh promises practical solutions to manage and overcome key trading emotions.
- Emotional mastery leads to clearer decisions, stronger discipline, and consistent profitability.
- The video emphasizes journaling, mindset shifts, and removing emotion from trade decisions.
Chapters
- 00:00Introduction: Emotion vs Strategy in Trading
- 01:45Paradigm: Seeing the Market Through Your Lens
- 03:24Subconscious Programming and Trading Behavior
- 05:44Common Trading Mistakes and Emotional Triggers
- 07:58The Emotional Cycle Causing Trading Losses
- 10:08Understanding Fear in Trading
- 11:39Removing Emotion from Trading Decisions
- 13:45Defining and Managing Greed in Trading
- 15:32Long-Term Success Through Discipline and Edge Execution
- 19:42Revenge Trading and Mental Well-Being
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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Fear makes you hesitate. Doubt makes you second-guess yourself. FOMO makes you rush into a trade even though there's no opportunity. Anger makes you want to revenge trade and just continue trading to make back the loss that you have just
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incurred. And frustration makes you break your trading rules you already know that you should follow.
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So, even if your strategy is solid, because of emotions, your execution keeps falling apart.
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That is why in this lesson, I want to talk about trading psychology and how to actually manage the emotions that show up when your real hard-earned money is on the line.
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The goal is not to be emotionless. The goal is to stop letting those emotions control your decisions.
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And once you learn how to master these emotions, which is what we're going to cover in this lesson, right? FOMO, anger, fear, all these emotions.
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What happens is that your execution becomes a lot cleaner, which ultimately means you become more profitable.
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Right. So, with that being said, let's dive into the lecture. 95% of traders do not fail because of a bad strategy. They fail because of a flawed paradigm.
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Now, what is a paradigm? Your paradigm is the lens through which you see reality. Your paradigm is the way you see the world. Your paradigm is the way you perceive the markets.
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It is formed by what you believe, how you think, and who you believe you are.
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Because we don't see the market for what it is. We see it for who we are.
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This is the first important lesson that I wanted to grab for today. We don't see the market for what it is, we see it for who we are.
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We are looking at the market thinking that price is going to go up right now.
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But does that mean that price is actually going to go up? No, because that's just our bias of the market.
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That's just our perception of the market. We perceive prices being cheap right now at a discount. But, that doesn't mean that price will not go down any lower.
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So, we don't see the market for what it is. We see it for who we are.
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And right now, your current paradigm is running on an old program. One that was never designed for consistent profitable trading.
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Most traders think they're making decisions consciously. But, the truth is most of the behavior runs on autopilot.
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Because, believe it or not, around 95% of your daily actions are driven by your subconscious programming.
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When you brush your teeth, when you wash your face, when you eat lunch or dinner, when you watch a certain Netflix show at a certain time, when you go on to the markets and open up your trading broker and start
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trading, all of these run by your subconscious programming, which is comprised of your belief, your habits, and your emotional reactions.
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It's like pressing play on a program that's already been written. And every single day, that program just keeps running in the background.
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So, if your internal program is built on fear, doubt, bad habits, that's exactly what will show up in your trading.
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Which is why most traders don't fail because of strategy. They fail because of their programming.
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Shh. And that's not a criticism. That's simply where most traders start. Like I said, I know it because I was there, too.
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I was awake. I was blind. But, now I see. And the reason I'm pointing this out is because you cannot change something you haven't identified yet.
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You cannot fix the problem without understanding the root cause of the problem. You cannot become profitable unless you understand why you are failing.
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Because your current results are a reflection of how you see the market. And the way you see the market is shaped by your paradigm.
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Let me explain. Your paradigm creates your thoughts. Your thoughts create your decisions. Your decisions create your actions, and your actions create your results.
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Quick example, if you believe the market is cheap right now, you're going to think that you want to enter for a buy.
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And if you think that, you're going to enter for a buy. Next thing you know, you go on to your broker and you enter for a buy position. That's the action that was created by your thought.
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And when you enter for a buy in the market itself, and the market now reverses against you, and you get stopped out, that's your result that is based on your action, that was based on your decision, and that is based on a paradigm. All
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stem from the fact that you believed the market was cheap in the first place.
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Which means your paradigm is the root cause of your results. Most traders try to fix their trading by changing their strategy. A new indicator, new setup, new market, new system. But nothing really changes, isn't it?
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The real shift only happens when your nervous system changes first. If your body is still wired for stress, survival, and the old emotional patterns, your brain will keep recreating the same mistakes in the market over and over again.
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This is why you commit the same mistake, like revenge trading, forcing trades, overtrading, overleveraging, over and over again, even though you should know that you shouldn't be doing it.
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This is why. Because your brain will always default to what feels familiar. If you want different results, you cannot just change your strategy. You cannot just change your actions.
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You have to go deeper than that. You have to change the program. And the good news is this: paradigms can be changed. Your mind can be reprogrammed.
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And once that happens, everything about your trading starts to change. Your decisions become clearer, your discipline becomes stronger, and the market finally starts to make sense. And this is my favorite quote by Carl Jung, which he said that until you make the
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unconscious conscious, you will direct your life and you will call it fate. Until you recognize the unconscious patterns, you are tend to repeat it over and over again and get the exact same results.
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And this is exactly what happens in trading. Most traders believe they're making rational decisions, but in reality, their unconscious mind is making the decision for them.
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And it reveals itself through something very specific, which is your emotions. And this is where it gets interesting.
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Every emotion you feel while trading is not random. It is simply your brain trying to avoid a specific type of pain.
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And the pain usually looks like this: fear of losing money, fear of being wrong, fear of missing out, and fear of looking stupid.
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And once you start to see this, everything about your trading starts to make sense.
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The hesitation, the revenge trades, the blown accounts, none of it was random. It was all just unmanaged emotion running on autopilot.
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Fear, greed, FOMO, hope, and revenge trading, every single one of these emotions follows the exact same cycle.
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Once again, I'm not going to give you surface-level information like, "Oh, just control your emotions, bro." I'm going to give you the exact solution on how to combat each one of these emotions. You see this cycle right here? This is the cycle that every single one of you are going through right now. And this is exactly what causes you to lose. That's the chain that keeps you stuck every single time without exception.
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The cycle never changes. What changes is which emotion triggers it, which pain is trying to protect you from, and how much it ends up costing you. So, now I'm going to go through each emotion. Like I said, fear, greed, right? Doubt, FOMO,
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revenge trading. All of those emotions that I just shared with you guys, I'm going to go through each one of these emotions and tell you guys how to solve that emotion. Because I know that a lot of you guys are just controlled by these
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emotions when you are trading. And when you are controlled by them, you are unconscious and your body just starts to move in a way as though it's gotten possessed or something. So, I'm going to go through
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each
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each emotion and I'm really just going to show you how to solve each one.
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First emotion is fear. Fear in trading is the moment when your setup is right there. Everything lines up. But your friend freezes on the mouse. You hesitate. You second guess. You talk yourself out of it.
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And fear isn't random, okay? This is not some random emotion. It's simply your brain trying to protect you from the pain of being wrong.
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Because think about it, thousands of years ago, back when we were hunter-gatherers, being wrong could literally get you killed. Shoot. You go out in the jungle, you pick the wrong food, you eat the wrong food, you die.
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You misread a threat like a saber-tooth tiger or like a freaking mammoth just like this, you die.
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You make the wrong decision, you die. You don't get a second chance. So, that fear has been conditioned into us for thousands of millions of years.
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So, that is where your brain learned one thing. Just avoid being wrong at all costs.
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That's what fear really is. And now that same wiring is showing up in your trading.
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And here's the irony. When you don't click the buy and sell button, you think you're playing it safe.
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But what you're actually doing is that you're collecting less data. Which means you're building less conviction, which makes the fear even stronger.
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As a result, hesitation breeds even more hesitation. So, remember the cycle I just showed you just now? Let's apply that cycle to fear.
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Fear, that's the emotion, right? You are scared to press the buy and sell button.
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You are scared of the market. You're not sure whether the trade will actually play out or not.
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Fear. The pain that you avoided in this case is the pain of being wrong.
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Like I said earlier, your brain is conditioned to avoid the pain of being wrong.
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The behavior in this case is that you skip the trade. You see the nice setup that is aligned with the trade plan, but you skip it because you're scared.
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You're scared of uncertainty. You're scared of what could possibly go wrong. Outcome? You miss a setup.
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And when you miss a setup, you are inconsistent with your actions. And you start doubting if your system even works.
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Once again, you're not collecting sufficient data. And if you're not collecting sufficient data because you're not taking enough trades, then how can you have confidence in your system? Now, what's the solution? What's the solution to fear?
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It's very simple. It's to remove yourself from the decision. It's to remove emotion from the equation.
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Easier said than done, huh? Now, instead of giving you like motivational I'm going to give you an actionable step.
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Before the market opens, I want you guys to write down your entry criteria. For example, if price steps the supply zone and there's a liquidity sweep, I enter.
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If not, no trade. That's it. You need to have like a very simple if-then rule, just like this, so that you are mechanical when it comes to the way you execute your trades.
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That's it. Binary yes and no decision. This is where you stop asking, "Hmm, do I feel like this is a good trade?" And you start asking, "Did my rules actually trigger?
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Did Is this trade actually align with my trade plan?" And here's something that I've learned back in the military.
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Fear only exists before you do the difficult task. Before you go out to the 5-day, 4-night mission in the jungle, before the live shooting, before the fitness test, before you step into the unknown.
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But once you move, once you put on the helmet and the goggles and the night vision goggles, and you put your camouflage on, and you take your first step into the jungle, once you commit, once you do the thing, the fear starts
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to disappear. It's the same thing here in trading. Fear only exists before you click the buy and sell button.
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Once you enter the trade, just detach from the outcome. Let the rules decide. Let the market dictate the outcome.
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And when I do that, the fear just disappears. And I want you guys to remember what fear stands for. It simply stands for false evidence appearing real. F E A R.
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Okay, so remember that going forward. So, that's how you combat fear. Next, I'm going to go through greed.
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This is how I define greed. Greed is the urge to squeeze more out of the market than your edge allows.
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After a winning streak, you feel invincible. If you're on the top of the world, you start oversizing. You start trading London session, New York session, Asia session. You You trade every single hour. You chase every single possible setup because you don't want to leave
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money on the table. And then one trade, you size up. You know, you ramp up the lot size because you feel unstoppable. You feel confident that you could make it.
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And that one trade become a big loss that wipes out everything you made that week.
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Now, who has suffered this situation before? Where you end up giving back all the profits that you've made back to the market. Now, let's apply this same cycle to greed.
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So, once again, this same cycle. First, greed. That's the emotion, right? You get greedy after a winning streak.
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You start feeling euphoric. You start feeling overconfident. You start feeling invincible. That causes you to take more trades.
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Greed. The pain avoided is missing opportunity. Right? Guess what? When you're greedy, you don't miss opportunities, right?
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Because you're catching every single opportunity that presents itself in the to you. And the behavior is oversizing, overtrading, and ignoring the trade plan.
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Okay, so you start ramping up your lot size. You start ramping up your leverage. You start taking more trades that's outside of a trade plan.
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And guess what? Whatever money that you made so far gets donated back to the market.
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Oh, you are up $5,000? No biggie. You just gave back $6,000 to the market.
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Oh, you made 10K today? Well, tomorrow you just lost 10K. So, every single dollar or pound or yen or whatever currency that you have right now, gets donated back to the market all because of greed. Here's the thing about trading
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that most people don't understand. This is not a job that pays you based on the amount of hours that you work.
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In trading, you don't get rewarded for effort. You get rewarded for making the right decisions.
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So, just because you spent 12 hours a day on the charts, doesn't mean that you are going to become profitable.
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Unless you're making the right decisions, taking the right trades. So, what's the fix to greed then?
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Now, once again, I'm going to give you a actionable step that you can take to combat this emotion. I'm not going to say stupid like, "Oh, bro, just control your emotions and you'll be fine, man." I'm going to give you an
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actionable step. Before the market opens, I want you to set your ceiling. Okay so it could be time-based, it could be trade-based, it could be profit-based, right? So, you just want to set a ceiling just like this. I'm only going to be trading for 2
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hours. I'm only going to take three trades maximum. And once I made 2% or 3% or whatever ceiling that I set for myself, I'm done.
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I'm done. Whatever your ceiling is, you need to decide it before the market opens.
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Not when the volatility starts kicking in and you start getting emotional. Not when you are in the middle of a winning streak. Before the market even opens, you have your goal.
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So, that when you hit that goal, you're done. You close your laptop, you go for a walk in the park, you'll go and walk your dog, or you go and spend time with family, whatever. That's the fix.
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If you hit your target early, you close the laptop. Okay? Like I said, non-negotiable. And once again, this is not you backing down like a whim. It's you acting like a professional.
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Because success isn't about making the most amount of money today. Success is about is about executing your edge with discipline today so that you can consistently make money in the long run.
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That's great. Right? So, the reason why like I said, I want to give you the action actionable step. I don't want to say some woo-woo like, "Yo, man, you just got to like go and look in the mirror and tell yourself that I'm not
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greedy 100 times a day and the greed will magically disappear overnight." No, that doesn't work, all right? I'm sharing with you what works. Okay, once again, all of this emotion I faced it multiple times throughout my entire trading career. That is why I can give
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you the solution because I faced the demon, I slaughtered the demon, and I know the solution. And now I'm giving you the sword to to slaughter that same demon yourself.
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The next emotion is fear of missing out. FOMO is when you see a candle running hot and you jump in late because you're terrified of missing the move. That's how I define FOMO.
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And then price immediately reverses and stops you out because you weren't in the trade at the right place at the wrong time. You were in the trade at the emotional place.
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Now once again, let's apply the same cycle to FOMO, which is like I said, fear of missing out.
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Emotion, fear of missing out. Pain avoided, missing opportunity. All right, you are scared to miss the opportunity that's in front of you.
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Behavior, you enter way too late. And when you enter way too late, what happens is that your stop loss is usually way too wide.
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And now you're out chasing momentum rather than chasing the trade that is actually aligned with your trade plan.
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Now you're out chasing money rather than attracting money. And when that happens, you get trapped at the worst possible price and you take the loss which could be avoided.
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That's what FOMO does to you. And here's what I need to understand. The market has always been here for decades, okay? Like it has been here for decades. It has been here since your grandfather was born, and it will be
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here for decades more. It'll be here for your grandson. It'll be here for your great granddaughter. It will always be here. There will always be another setup.
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Opportunities don't run out. They just rotate. Missing one trade doesn't mean losing. It just means the next one hasn't shown up yet.
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So, what's the fix for FOMO? The fix is if you weren't prepared for a trade, it was never your trade to begin with.
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So, do not take the trades that you are not ready for, because those are the trades that is outside of your trade plan. And if you miss trades that is outside of the trade plan, then by definition, those are not your trades
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to begin with. Because remember, it's not the first good trade, and it's surely not the last.
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You need to adopt this abundance mentality, where there's so much opportunities in the market.
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Just like waiting for the bus, another one is always coming. Okay? So, abundance mentality is the solution to FOMO. When you believe that there's always going to be opportunities every single hour in every single market, every single day, you will not
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be tempted to actually rush into a bad trade. Next one is hope. Okay, the next solution is No, the next problem is hope.
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Okay, this is like a lot of you guys don't know that this is actually a problem, but it is indeed an emotion that can actually impair your decision-making. Okay, hope. Let's dive deep into this.
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Because this is the underrated one. Hope is when you are in a losing position, and instead of cutting it, you move your stop loss, make it even wider, you know, make it a little bit further away and pray to the market, to the universe the
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price will eventually reverse and go back into profit. Hope is when you're already down $3,000.
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But, you know, I want the market to reverse, so I'm going to move my stop loss a little bit.
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And then you go into a drawdown of $4,000 and then $5,000. You refuse to cut the loss early.
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And here's why I consider hope dangerous. It's because you are literally outsourcing your responsibility to chance.
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Now, let's apply this same cycle to hope. Emotion, hoping you get out of a drawdown, hoping price will eventually reverse and go in your way again.
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Pain avoided, accepting that you are wrong, right? Because if you don't get stopped out, you're not wrong, right? Like technically, you are still uh you're still correct, right? Your ego doesn't get bruised.
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The behavior, you move the stop loss, you hold on to a losing position, and you pray.
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Okay, you just pray that oh, price will eventually go up. Outcome, small loss becomes a big loss.
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Discipline erodes and your account crashes. This is how one loss, you could have lost 1%, but you continue trading, now you lose 5%.
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You could have just blown one account, but you continue trading and you lost five accounts. This is why it's hope.
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There's a version of this that every trader knows. The person who just keeps on moving their stop loss further and further away. Not because it's part of the plan, but because they cannot face being wrong.
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And every single time you choose your ego over making money, you are funding a war against yourself.
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And the only way to win in trading is to stop funding that war. Bro, when I actually wrote this sentence down, I was like mind-blown by how true this is.
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Because in trading, you can either choose your ego or make money, but you cannot have both.
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So, what's the fix then? The fix is you want to place your stop loss at a price point which invalidate your trade idea before you enter the trade.
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Not during, not after, but before you enter the trade, and you never move it further away.
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Once price hit your stop loss, you're out. No negotiating, no waiting for one more candle, no hoping. You're done. You're out.
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All right, so that's the mechanical solution to fix hope. And there's a technical solution. This is a psychological solution, okay?
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Psychological solution is to just accept the fact that losses are good. Losses are not failures. Losses are not, you know, scoreboard not scoreboard that tells you that you're at trading.
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Just because you lose money doesn't mean that you suck at trading. Losses are simply the cost of doing business.
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And every business has expenses. Rent, fuel staff overhead. Losses are your expenses. When you accept that losses are a mandatory part of trading, you will never ever get rid of them. It's inevitable.
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This thing start to disappear. And you stop needing the market to save you. And more importantly, you stop needing the market to validate you.
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Because remember, guys, you cannot control what the market does, but you can control what you do on a day-to-day basis. You can control how you show up every single day. You can control your process. You can control whether you
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journal the trade, whether you follow your trade plan or not. And that's where you should invest your time, energy, and attention to.
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Once stop loss is hit, close the trade, move on to the next setup. That's it.
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Right, that's the solution to hope. You respect the stop loss. Next up, we got revenge trading.
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Man. Okay people. How many accounts have you guys blown because of revenge trading? Be brutally honest in the chat right now. How many accounts have you blown because of revenge trading? Six, three, five, two.
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Damn okay. You can see a lot of people have blown accounts because of revenge trading, yeah?
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I blown seven in my first year. First year alone, okay? If I count my other years, probably like 10, 15. I don't know. A lot of freaking accounts. Like I I lost track of counting.
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So, yeah. It's good to see that everybody has revenge traded before. Because who haven't revenge traded before?
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This one is honestly the most destructive of all. I believe that this is the one that causes you to lose the most amount of money.
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You take a loss, and instead of accepting it and moving on, something ignites inside you.
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You need to make it back right now. So, you take another trade and another trade.
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Each one with a bigger size and less thought through than the last one. And then eventually blow up.
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Right? All because you feel this need to prove to the market that you are right and the market is wrong.
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You feel this need to prove everyone else wrong. No, you don't blow up because of a loss.
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You blow up because you kept trading after the loss. This is the uncomfortable truth that everybody need to like come into consensus with.
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You don't blow up because of a loss. You blow up because you keep trading after the damn loss.
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Yeah, and above that, it's like you're not trading the market anymore. You are trading your mental well-being.
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Ah. Such great quotes. Like bro, like these are the tweets that I actually share on my Twitter account, by the way.
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Like what have you guys see on the screen? I literally write this stuff, okay? So, so it's not some random chat GPT nonsense that I generate on the screen. I actually write this stuff. So, when I say something just like this,
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I'm like having a mind orgasm because, bro, that's true. You're not trading the market anymore. You are trading your mental well-being. Now, let's apply the same cycle to revenge trading.
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Emotion, anger, frustration, humiliation after a loss. Right? Uh, you know, I want to punch my monitor.
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Been avoided? Admitting defeat. Been avoided? Being wrong. I don't want to be wrong. I don't want to admit defeat. I'm a I'm I'm not a quitter, man. The god hates quitters, right? I'm not a quitter. So, I'm going to, you know, continue like
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press the buy button all the way until I actually make it. Admitting defeat. Behavioral retaliation traits.
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Oversizing. Re-entering the market immediately. Outcome? One bad trade becomes five. One red day becomes a blown week. Small losses turn into big losses.
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You compound the losses because you couldn't accept the fact that you are wrong. Here's the harsh truth about the market.
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The market doesn't care about you. It doesn't owe you anything. In fact, it doesn't even know you exist.
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So, why are you taking the losses personally? The market doesn't care about your race, your height, your religion, your background, your political belief.
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It doesn't give a about you. It doesn't even know you. It's a stranger to you. So, why do you care about what the market think about you?
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Why are you taking the losses personally? Once again, mindset shift. Every stop out is feedback. Every loss is information.
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Every single trade you take is data points for you to improve. The traders who grow from losses treat them as lessons. The traders who blow accounts treat them as personal attacks.
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Let that sink in for a minute. So, what's the fix then for revenge trading? The emotion that, you know, causes all of us to like uh like causes all of us to be paralyzed.
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The fix is what I call the 10-minute rule. Just like what the name pretty much suggests, after any loss, I want you to step away from the screen for 10 minutes minimum.
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Okay? I don't care what you have to do. I don't care whether to like close your laptop or you have to throw your laptop off the window of the balcony, I don't care. Now, don't don't do that, of
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course. But like, just step away from the screen, right? Maybe lock your phone, lock your laptop somewhere. Make it out of reach for 10 minutes.
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Every single time I take a loss, stop, pause for 10 minutes, no exceptions. And I also use what I call the no trade rule.
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So, on top of the time limit that I give myself, I also give myself like another trade limit.
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I would never enter the very next candle after a loss. So, today if I take a loss, shut my laptop down. I don't look at the next candle, what the next candle is going to do, and enter again. No, I
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don't enter the very next candle after a loss. This way, a pause is literally enforced into my trading system before I make the next decision. Before I take the next trade, I'm literally forcing myself to pause, [snorts] slow down,
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re-evaluate the market again, and think about whether I want to enter the trade. If after 10 minutes, you still see a setup that aligns with trade plan, then yeah, by all means go ahead.
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But more often than not, the feeling, the adrenaline that you face during those uh that you face right after you take the loss, it start to dissipate. It start to fade away because of this 10 minutes rule right here.
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And most importantly, I want you guys to use these 10 minutes to write down what happened. What rule did you break and what you would do differently and then come back. So, this is where you journal the trade down,
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right? Journal exactly what happened and just introspect over it, just reflect over it. Like I said, every loss is a data point. Every loss is a feedback for you to actually improve.
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Right? So, once you do that, then you can eventually come back to the market and re-evaluate the situation.
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The reason why I force you guys to do this, my students as well, is because you cannot make rational decisions when you're emotional.
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When you're emotional, the emotional part of your brain overwhelms the rational part of your brain.
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This is why when you are trying to talk to your girlfriend or boyfriend and they start getting emotional and all that stuff, you try to rationalize the situation to them.
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But they they're just they can't hear you, right? Because they're in the state of emotional, right? Their adrenaline is high.
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Everything you say to them is like essentially, you know, one ear in, one ear out because they're emotional. Same thing right here. When you're emotional, you cannot make rational decisions.
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So, this 10 minutes isn't negotiable. It's a law that you must follow. This 10 minutes alone could save you thousands of dollars worth of unnecessary losses down the line. The next emotion is doubt.
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Doubt is when you second guess your system even when your setup is right there in front of you.
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Hmm, I don't know, man. I don't know whether the trade will actually work out or not. I don't know whether my trade plan actually works or not. I don't trust myself to take the the trade at all. I don't know, man.
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Now, here's the thing about doubt that nobody talks about. Doubt isn't weakness. Doubt is simply incompetence revealing itself.
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You don't doubt brushing your teeth. You don't doubt tying a shoelace. You don't doubt driving because you've done them thousands of times.
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They are automatic behaviors you have wired into yourself through repetition. You doubt your trading because you haven't built enough reps for it to feel automatic yet.
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Now, let's apply this same cycle to doubt. Okay? So, emotion is obviously uncertainty. Before during and all during a life setup, you are not sure whether the trade will actually go in a way. You're not sure whether your trade plan will
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actually work. You are unsure. Uh you are like not sure because you're feeling this sense of uncertainty.
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Pain avoided being wrong, right? If you are not sure, then guess what? It's better be safe to just not enter for a trade. And because if you don't enter for the trade, you cannot be wrong.
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It's not rocket science, right? Like if you don't take the trade, you you're just going to be 100% right.
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100% right, but 99% wrong. Behavior is that you freeze or you get out of a good trade. Okay, so you see the trade setup in front of you, aligns with a trade plan, bullish candlestick pattern at this freaking
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demand zone. That's what you do. You you just freeze. Okay, you just freeze there.
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You are too afraid to enter into the market even though it's right there. Or you enter into the market, you enter into the trade, but price starts reversing against you, you get out of the good trade.
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You convince yourself that oh no, man, maybe it's not going to go up in my way.
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I better get out right now and cut my loss instead of holding it to my DP.
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You get off a winning position all because of doubt. Doubt is a freaking virus. It's a infectious disease that actually like permeates your entire being.
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That's That's how harmful doubt is. And when you do that, the outcome is that you miss an entry.
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You start getting inconsistent with the day trades that you take. And the doubt starts to get stronger.
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You start to feed the doubt. You feed the demon inside you. Next time the setup appears again, you stay out of the market. You freeze. You are scared.
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Doubt just breeds more doubt. So, what's the fix to doubt? The fix is not motivation. The fix is evidence. Like I mentioned earlier, you need to prove to yourself that you are indeed who you say you are.
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You don't build conviction by shouting affirmations in the mirror every single day. I'm going to be the best trader in the entire world. I'm going to win. I'm going to make $5,000 today. I'm going to, you know, buy my dream Lamborghini.
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No, that's not how it works. You build conviction through reps. Through back testing. Through following your trade plan. Through journaling. Through executing. Through reviewing your trades.
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That's what builds conviction. And once again, say it with me. All right, say it with me, okay? Conviction comes from confidence. And confidence start comes from competence. And competence comes from consistency. There we go. Thank you for saying it with me.
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Even though I can't hear you guys, but I know some of you guys are actually saying it right now. I appreciate that, man. So, every single trade you take is a vote for the trader that you are becoming.
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Which also means that every trade you take and review is a brick in the wall of self-trust.
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Every promise you make to yourself and keep makes the next decision easier. I say this to my students all the time.
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Every single time you follow your trade plan, you are literally voting for yourself to become a disciplined and consistent trader. And a disciplined and consistent trader is a profitable trader.
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So, no trade is wasted. Every single trade you take is a vote. Doubt is not defeated by positive thinking.
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It's crushed by competence built through repetition. I'll give you a quick example. Back when I was like kind of overweight, you know, I was overweight because of bulking and you know, became like super duper fat.
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Every single day I would freaking manifest and try to like visualize myself being skinny and jacked again.
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For months I would just do that without going to the gym. So, I just like visualize but I don't go to the gym.
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Do you think I lose fat magically after 6 months? Hell no. Because I haven't put on the running shoes and go to the gym.
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Same thing right here. You don't defeat doubt by positive thinking. You defeat doubts by going to the freaking gym. You defeat doubt by building repetition, putting reps, following the trade plan, journaling, reviewing, gathering data, refining your trade plan, improving.
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Competence crushes doubts. Once again, another one of my um very like famous tweet which performed really really well. You want consistent profits but your actions aren't consistent. You want conviction in your trade ideal but you have never collected data. You want
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confidence in yourself but you have never done the hard things. One is simply the price of the other.
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Man, such a good trade. So, ladies and gentlemen, I just handed you a map of every single emotions that's been sabotaging you and how to fix them.
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Once again, I didn't go through the spiritual woo-woo route and tell you guys to just freaking you know, look in the mirror and smile and do affirmations every single day.
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No. I dive into the root cause of each emotion, let you know what's the pain that you're avoiding, and also give you a actionable step, a solution to fix each one of those emotions.
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Like I said, it was never about the market. It was never about your broker.
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And I saw one comment I I saw someone say this earlier, "The market is hunting my stop loss." No, it was never about the smart money hunting your stop loss.
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It was never because of bad luck. It was never because you are a freaking Asian. It was never because you are 5 ft tall. It was never because of your political belief, your belief, your religion, your race, or your whatever. It None of None of
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that matters. Until you point a finger back at yourself, whatever that you point a finger at will have control over you, will have power over you. If you point a finger, the blame finger at the market, the market
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has control over you. If you point a blame finger at your broker, then you cannot actually become better, right? Because that is outside of your control. You have been fighting yourself this whole time.
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And now you can finally see it. Like I said, I was blind, but now I see.
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Every single one of those emotions, when left unaddressed, follows the exact same structure. Emotion, pain of avoidant, behavior, and outcome.
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And every single one of those emotions has a rule-based fix. That, my friend, is how you build a real trading system.
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And unlike what most of you guys think, a trading system doesn't just tell you when to enter and when to exit.
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It should tell you what to do when you're afraid. When you are greedy, when you're out for blood.
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It should completely remove you from the equation at the exact moments when you are the most dangerous to yourself.
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So, here's exactly what you're going to do starting today to close this execution gap. Okay? Once again, I'm going to give you actionable steps, okay? Step by step to implement everything that we have learned throughout these past 2 hours or so.
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Like I said, you guys got to do this And because when you do this, you change your behavior. You change your identity.
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And when you do that, you change your results. So, grab your notebook if you guys haven't done that.
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And I want you guys to write down physically on your notebook or whatever, notes or whatever, write down the one or two emotions that you recognize most in your own trading from everything that I just shared.
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Whether that's fear, greed, FOMO, hope, revenge, doubts, whatever it is, pick the ones that made you nod your head the most while I was talking about them. Pick the ones that you are struggling with the most.
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Those are yours. Write them down right now. Step two, introspect, okay? Important, nothing changes if nothing changes.
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Take the time out to introspect. Stop hiding behind the story you've been telling yourself about why you keep losing.
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Stop saying stupid like, "Oh my god, man, the broker stopped me out again. Oh my god, freaking institutions are hunting my stop loss. Oh my god, it's all that fake guru's fault." No, stop doing all that stuff.
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Start taking full responsibility over your trading right now. Start taking extreme ownership. Because when you do that, now you're taking back control of your trading and you're taking back control of your life.
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And instead, I want to ask yourself this question right here. What pain am I running from right now?
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What pain am I running from? Like I said, just now I've shared with you guys each emotion and what pain you are essentially avoiding.
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When a FOMO hits, you're not excited about an opportunity. You're terrified of being left alone.
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When you revenge trade, you're not being aggressive. You are refusing to accept that the market has just humiliated you.
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When greed takes over, you're not being ambitious. You're so scared of missing out that you would rather destroy your edge than walk away.
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And step three is to apply the solution. Because like I said earlier, for the past 2 hours I've literally listed down every single emotion. And all of this emotion has a specific rule attached to it, an actionable step. And that rule exists
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for one reason. To take the decision out of your hands at the exact moment when you are the most dangerous to yourself.
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And I want you guys to use it. Listen guys, whatever that I just shared right here, it's essentially mental masturbation if you don't actually do this, okay? It's essentially just you feeling motivated and inspired like a freaking junkie, but it's useless if you
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don't actually apply the fix. So whatever that you actually face, right? Whatever emotion that it is, find the solution which I've went through, and I want you guys to apply it.
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Action. Awareness without action is just self-pity. So, see the emotion, name the pain, and then follow the rule.
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That's it. Every single time, no exceptions. That's how the patterns break. That's how you break out of the cycle of unprofitability. It won't be easy at first.
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And that's okay. Nothing worth building ever is. Okay? I know a lot of you guys are going through that that that phase right now where it's it's not easy. It sucks. It's going to suck for an extremely long
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time. I don't know exactly when it's going to stop sucking, but it's going to suck.
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And it's okay. Go through the suck. Embrace the suck. Here's what happens when you commit to the process and you keep showing up anyway.
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Every single rep you put in, every single time you catch the emotion and you follow the rule instead, you are literally rewiring your brain.
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I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean this literally. You are literally building new neural pathways that make the right decision feel more natural than the wrong one.
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Every single time you catch yourself feeling greedy and you're about to, you know, size up, you stop yourself. Boom.
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You are telling yourself that you're going to stop when this emotion arises again. Every single time you feel fear, you know, you're not sure whether you should actually enter for the trade or not, boom, you implement a solution. Now you
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are training your mind, your body, your soul to do the right action every single time that emotion actually arises.
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And the neurons that fire together wire together. Until one day something shift. The hesitation is gone. The revenge trades are gone. The FOMO is gone.
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Not because you fought it with willpower or useless, you know, spiritual woo-woo stuff, but because you replace it with something stronger.
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Awareness. Awareness. Now you can see the unconscious patterns you used to repeat automatically. And once you see the pattern, you can finally change the program.
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And just to be clear, the goal here is not to suppress your emotions like AI or a robot or a humanoid robot or whatever.
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In fact, the more you try to suppress them, the stronger they become. Because what you resist persists. The more you focus on the anger, the fear, the FOMO, the scarcity, the fear, the more they actually appear in your life and in trading.
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Listen, even the best traders in the entire world, including myself, feel fear, greed, and frustration.
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The difference is this. Professional traders have rules and systems that neutralize the emotion before it hijacks the decision.
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Remember what I said earlier? When you're emotional, the emotional part of the brain literally override the logical part of the brain.
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Which means that if you don't have a system, you are going to give in to your emotions.
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100% guaranteed. The goal here is not to eliminate emotion. In fact, this is life, man. You got to experience the full range of emotions. You got to feel the the joy, the despair, the the gratitude, you know, the suffering, the pain.
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That's what life is about. It's to feel the full range of emotions. And in trading, the goal is to build a system that protects you from it.
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Once again, not to get rid of the emotion and become like a psychopath, but build a system that protects you from the emotion to prevent it from prevent the emotion from taking control of you.
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Now, think of it this way. You can't stop wave from hitting the shore. But you can build a seawall.
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Rules, checklist, risk management, that's your seawall. And that seawall doesn't build itself. It gets built rep by rep, rule by rule, every single day.
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Which brings us back to what I told you at the very beginning. Once again, conviction comes from confidence.
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Confidence comes from competence, and competence comes from consistency. And consistency comes from systems. Not willpower.
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A mechanical system that makes the right decision automatic before the wrong one even have a chance to surface. So, hopefully after this lesson, you have learned that trading psychology is not just some soft topic on the side, right?
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It's not just a side quest. It is a huge part of whether you actually make money or not.
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The emotions, the fear, the doubts, the FOMO, the greed, the anger, the frustration, they will always be there in some form as long as you are alive.
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The question is not whether you feel them. The question is whether you let them control your execution.
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All right? At the end of the day, mastering your emotion does not means becoming numb to it.
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It simply means becoming aware enough to catch what you're feeling, understand where is it coming from, right? The pain that you're avoiding, and returning back to your trading rules before you do something stupid.
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To me, that's real emotional control. Right? Remember, the traders who win in the long-term, they are not usually the ones with the best predictions. They are simply the ones who can stay the most stable under pressure.
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So, yes, work on your strategy, learn the market mechanics concepts, but also spend some time working on the person who has to execute the strategy when it matters the most.
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Spend more time on the inner work as you do on the chart work. Because if you cannot manage your inner state, the market will keep exposing it.
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So, with that being said, I hope you guys have enjoyed this longest lecture. And happy learning.
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I'm looking forward to see you in the next lesson. And as always, remember, you're just one trade away.
Topics:trading psychologyemotional managementtrading emotionsfear in tradingFOMOrevenge tradingtrading disciplinesubconscious programmingmarket perceptionBrad Goh
