Today was a bad day for me with trading and I didn't even place an order. 

I'm certainly still struggling with the emotional side of things. Today there were multiple morning panic/dip buy opportunities and I just could not get myself to take a small lousy position. $FFRMF was a classic drop today and I had my order ready to go in the low .90 cent area. Even Tim bought in and alerted the chat room of his entry but at that point I refuse to chase an alert. I suppose it was reassuring my thesis was right.I'm almost done reading "Trading in the Zone" by Mark Douglas and have quite a few pages of notes. 

I'm going to share some points that stood out to me that I went back to reflect on. Maybe it will help someone else sharing the same struggle as me. If you are interested psychological/emotional side of trading I highly suggest the book. Thanks for reading & good luck to all for Friday & the last trading day of 2017!

 

-Learning how to redefine your trading activities in a way that allows you to completely accept the risk is the key to thinking like a successful trader.

-Your fears act against you in such a way that it will cause the very thing you are afraid of to happen

-If you want to create consistency, you have to start from the premise that no matter what the outcome, you are completely responsible

-Winning attitude: A positive expectation of your efforts with an acceptance that whatever results you get are a perfect reflection of your level of development and what you need to learn to do better.

-It doesn't do you any good to take the risk of putting on a trade if you are afraid of the consequences. Your fears will act on your perception of information and your behavior in a way that will cause you to create the very experience you fear the most.

-If you accept the fact that the market doesn't generate positively or negatively charged information as an inherent characteristic of the way it expresses its self, then the only way information can take a positive or negative charge is in your mind. 

-The most effective and functional trading belief that you can require is "anything can happen" This will act as a solid foundation for building every other belief and attitude that the trader needs to be successful

-Without that belief, your mind will automatically and usually without your conscious awareness cause you to avoid, block, or rationalize away any information that indicates the market may do something you haven't accepted as possible. If you believe anything is possible there is nothing for your mind to avoid.

-We have to be rigid in our rules and flexible in our expectations. We need to be rigid in our rules so that we gain a sense of self trust, that can and will always protect us in an environment that has few if any boundaries. We need to be flexible in our expectations so we can perceive with the greatest degree of clarity and objectivity what the market is communicating to us from it's perspective. 

-To think in probabilities you have to create a mental framework or mindset that is consistent with the underlying principles of a probabilistic environment. A probabilistic mind set pertaining to trading consists of these 5 fundamental truths:

1) Anything can happen

2) You don't need to know what is going to happen next to make money

3) There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define edge

4) An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another.

5) Every moment in the market is unique

Again, thanks for reading I hope some of these notes help and if you haven't check out the book!