....until after I finish this book. Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas. I've been through HTMM a couple times and certain sections I've watched several times. Penny Stocking part deux, countless online video lesson from Tim Sykes and others have been a great education but I don't feel like any of those addressed my biggest trading problem.

I loved learning all the charts, patterns, setups, terminology, etc.... but none of that prepared me for the emotional rollercoaster I would be on once I had some actual skin in the game. I was killing it paper trading but once real money was on the line I freaked a bit. People will say "Don't trade with emotion" but that's just an empty platitude when you're a very "right-brained" person like me because we experience the world a little differently and it's nearly impossible to divorce emotion from, well, anything. I've been in the music biz for 35 years and creative types like me experience things in concepts, abstractions and feelings and after a time numbers, charts and analysis start to blur together and it gets difficult to apply meaning to all these things that start to look like just squiggles on a page.

If that's you then Mark Douglas knows what you're going through. He would outline trading problems and I just sat there and went "Holy Shit! He's speaking directly to me." He doesn't so much take the emotion out of the game as much as he tells you how to harness it and more importantly, redirect it to your advantage.

So for now I've cashed out all of my positions and I'm going to go through this book a couple of times before I get back in. I'm not worried, good plays will always be there. The market is like a river, only in the future I'm going to get into the flow of it rather than desperately try to paddle upstream, freaking out the whole time. Thankfully I still have plenty in my account because most of the time I was able to apply Sykes rule #1 and cut losses quickly. Sometimes I failed (looking at you CERE) but that rule works. Never forget that.

I don't know Mark Douglas and in no way am I affiliated with him, I just hope to help traders like me who have had issues in this area.

Trading in the Zone link