Welcome back everyone, last week we expressed some common frustrations that traders face and we covered how these emotional events can affect our state of mind and in turn affect our trading results. We discussed things that we know can affect how we trade and we also talked about things we may not know that are affecting us. I think anyone who is really honest with themselves can relate to those experiences. In the blog last week we also mentioned that all of these problems are in our control, meaning that we can change these things anytime we really want to if we are willing to work on ourselves and the tihngs we do. That sounds really easy right? We may need to re-evaluate that thought about being easy. If it were easy then everyone would be doing it, right? What if you find that you are unable to fix your personal blockages or psychological pressures? That is what we will be covering in the blog this week.

Trading by nature is a somewhat individual endevour, by that I mean that ultimately you are the one doing the research, learning the techniques, making the decisions, determining your bias and ulimately clicking the buttons at the end of the day. The other thing that can make trading seem like the loneliest game in the world is that at the end of day, trading is a competition. Your thoughts are matched against those of the other participants. There always has to be a buyer and a seller to have a transaction or what they call in the business price discovery. If you all buyers and no sellers then at the end of the day nothing will happen. So, by nature you have one participant with one view and another with the opposite view and thus you have a competition and at the end of the day one will be right and one will be wrong. This does not make trading bad, it just is what it is. Now I know some will say that you can have a win, win type of trade and this is infinitely true but it still comes down to a matter of perspective. For example, if you have someone that owns some stock and is worried that the market might fall and doesn’t want to take the hit if it does that individual can buy a put option for insurance, but that individual can only buy that insurance if someone is willing to sell it and that would mean that the other participant believes the stock is not going to fall or at least fall that much. Now, how does this become a win, win trade even though there are opposing view points? Well, lets say the individual that is buying the insurance is more than happy to pay the cost for the insurance because he or she can sleep well at night knowing that there stock is safe, I would call that a win. For the other individual, maybe he or she is happy to own that same stock at a specific price and is also happy to get paid to buy stock and therefore even though a different outlook is in play I would say that in this transaction we have a win, win scenario, but that doesn’t change the fact that money would flow one way or the other thereby making it a competition.

I hope from the above example that we can understand how trading can be a lonely sport from that perspective. The question that comes to mind is…does it have to be lonely, do we have to go it alone all the time? The answer from my perspective is no it does not. We ultimately will be pushing the buttons by ourselves and that is very indivdualistic but could we come together before the pushing of the buttons and collaborate and make sure that are benefitting from the collective wisdom of ourselves and others? I believe this to be absolutely true and I believe this because I see it all the time. I know many traders who trade together or in groups. I have several mentors that have trading partners that make them much more successful than if they tried to trade solely on their own. I also see trading clubs and communities that allow traders to come together to share collective experiences. If you happen to be reading this right now then you must realize that you are in one of the best collective experiences of all, you are a part of the Tackle Trading family and eveything we do from the clubhouse to the blogs to the shows is an opportunity to share in the collective and make this trading process a little less lonely.

This group concept can be great for sharing in the collective but what happens if you find yourself in the situation we described last week where the personal blockages and perhaps psychological pressures are affecting your trading and the collective experience isn’t helping to solve those issues? This is where one must expand “their” trading team and get help from other sources that are able to help with specific personal issues. This is where mentors and professionals can help bridge the gap between trading successfully and getting stuck up against those unknown and known forces. Let’s look at an example, perhaps you have a hard time putting in the work that is required to be successful, you may have other forces pulling at your time, like family commitments or other mini-crisis that seem to pop up all the time and take you away from the business of trading. You can do several things to solve this issue, the first is getting organized, if you schedule your day into blocks of time and stick to those timeframes you will see that a couple of things will happen, you will be more productive during the day and the things that seem like a mini-crisis that really isn’t will just tend to solve themselves. The second thing that would help is having a conversation with yourself regarding the most important parts of your life. You need to be in harmony with your parts and that means negotiating with yourself so that all the parts can function, like if you have a trading part and it requires 4 hours of work per day then the other parts of your life can be fit into the other hours you have available for the day. This may mean reducing the things you take on to accomplish but in the longer term, this will produce superior results in all areas. The third thing that can be done and is very important for most people is they need someone to hold them accountable for results. This is where a mentor can really help out, they can teach you what you need to learn but they can also hold your feet to the fire if you are underperforming. Mentors can also help with the mental blocks and the psychological pressures as they have most likely at some point experienced those same things along the way.

I hope you can see that even though the process of trading can be a singular type activity that it really doesn’t have to be nor should it. Everyone succeeds better with a team around them and us traders are no exception. Especially if one is struggling then the team members become that much more important as they can help break through the barriers so that we don’t waste our precious time and energy banging our head against the wall.

So, if you find yourself feeling lonely or stuck…reach out to your team and get the assistance needed to perform at your very best. You can tap into the collective consciousness of Tackle at tonights youtube live with a rockstar member of our team Gino P, or if you need more specific help you can look into some form of mentorship or coaching that can help you move further down the path to great trading.

Until next time,

Be well and trade safe,

Coach Holmes