How to get the mindset right?

Being a trader requires not just creating better strategies and conducting in-depth market analysis, but also fostering a winning mindset because only with the right attitude and skills one can seek results in their trading journey. Right mindset can be achieved by learning attitude and correct evaluation of market.

In order to have the right mindset traders need to you recognize the role of emotion and psychology and actively take steps to mitigate those effects.

Thank you T721 for providing the pdf's in this thread. I know that I am a n00b here but I know enough to know that I don't know a lot. I am an armchair psychotherapist and always examine the mindset more so than the method and you input in this regard has been invaluable.

1. Have realistic expectations: The Forex market can be volatile and unpredictable, so it's important to have realistic expectations about the potential returns and risks involved.
2. Develop a plan: Having a well-defined trading plan can help you stay focused and disciplined. It should include your trading strategy, risk management plan, and goals.
3. Stay patient: Trading Forex requires patience, as it is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It's important to wait for the right opportunities to enter the market and to avoid impulsive decisions.
4. Stay calm under pressure: The Forex market can be stressful at times, so it's important to stay calm and not let emotions like fear or greed affect your trading decisions.
5. Stay informed: Stay informed about the economic and political events that can affect the currency markets. This can help you identify opportunities and make better-informed trading decisions.
6. Learn from your mistakes: Every trader makes mistakes, but it's important to learn from them and not repeat the same mistakes.
7. Stay consistent: Trading Forex is not a one-time endeavor, it's a consistent process that requires persistence, commitment and patience.
8. Stay flexible: Be open to new ideas and adapt your trading strategy as market conditions change.

Remember, developing a successful Forex mindset takes time and practice. It's important to be persistent and stay committed to your goals.

I think you need to keep your eye on the ball. Be patient and do the work. Forex is like any other job, you aren't going to get rich quick.

I am also facing a lot of issues on the physiological part of Forex Trading.
After a few losing trades, I would always start question myself on if the setup I am waiting for is finally here.

I have been wanting to try and longer TF, but the uncertainly of not seeing the Price Action deters me.

I think, one of the most important things is to treat this like any other business or a corporate position you would have. This is why, I would say that you definitely should take a good care of your overall and physical health as well. This whole process requires mental strength and durability. If you are ill, or suffering from some sort of a condition that will influence your decision making processes or stress tolerance, it will not end well. Even though it is a fact that you are not going to make millions out there every single day, or have a 100% win ratio on your trades day in day out, it is still very important to be at your peak performance every day, this means not cutting corners, seeing things through, keeping your expectations in control, sticking to your trading plans, not negliging risk management procedures etc etc..

Repair your mindset first because it inspires traders to make wrong decision. Study the market more and more to uncover its mystery. Don’t ever think of over trading and revenge trading because they will harm you ultimately.

It is essential to have patience and confidence when trading. You need to be patient in waiting for the right opportunities and not rush into trades impulsively. And, confidence is also vital in trading as it helps you stick to your trading plan and make the right decisions.

Hey!

I would like to keep this short and sweet!
3 things to work on as a trader.

Emotions (Good or Bad) - Dont trade when too happy from winning trades, Dont trade when too sad from losing trades
Patience- Do not overtrade, set a target in both directions you win or lose and hit the target- take a breath and come back with a clear head.
Knowledge- Work on yourself and keep learning- only by learning and creating ideas by yourself you will be good on the long run-Cannot depend on others.

I think the key is to manage extreme emotions and not get carried away with those feelings because it can lead to emotional biases such as s such as overconfidence or FOMO. Also, always trade with a plan, and implement risk management.

One of my “ah ha” moments came after reading a book by trader Tom I believe it’s called something like “The best loser wins”. Now I am still trying to be a consistently profitable trader I am still learning this after right at 3 years trading now. I do not follow what he does or how he trades (it may be great it may not I don’t know) I just really liked his book and his approach to trading. The title literally sums up 95% of forex trading imo.

The right question to ask yourself is “What is enough?” and “Why do you want to trade?”. For me, trading is a way to supplement my main source of income and for me to have the choice of whether to work a 9-5. So even without a 9-5, I’m able to survive solely on my trading profits alone.

Educating yourself is just one part of trading, you need to understand the psychology behind trading and money. Do you find yourself trading properly when you’re backtesting and forward testing with a demo account, then when you switch over to a live account, you find yourself breaking all the rules and losing money? It just seem like trading is not for you and you don’t understand why there is a stark contrast with the performance. Trading with a live account means there is a possibility that you will lose your hard-earned money. If you’re risking $20 per trade, you are thinking that you will need to work 1 hour to earn that back. This is even worse if you’re trading $100 per trade. This might be 1 day’s worth of work for you. When price goes into drawdown against your trade, you are wondering if the trade will play out in your favour. You might cut your trade early, just to find out that the trade plays out well eventually, and you’ve just locked yourself to a $50 loss instead of a $250 profit. Even worse is if price almost hit your stop loss, you get afraid and when price reaches breakeven, you close the trade at breakeven, only to see price hitting your take profit next.

You have to overcome this fear.

First, have a solid backtested result of at least 100 trades, the more the better. Understand how your strategy will perform like the max drawdown you will experience, the average RRR and win rate you’re expecting out of your trading strategy. Once you have these data, it’s just a matter of time and probability before your live results show you similar results.

Second, start with trading small. When I say small, I say REAL small. Start with just 0.01 lot. You don’t have to care about money now. The loss with 0.01 lot is not big enough to hurt you nor will it be big enough to break your account. You want to get use to watching your equity go up and down during the live market. If your system allows, just use the set and forget approach so you will not mess around with your trades. Trade this for a few weeks. Slowly increase the lot size until your desired risk tolerance, and of course, within the 1% risk per trade rule.

Third, understand your greed. I know many people go into trading, wishing to earn that big bucks to get their own lambo. Trading is actually not a get-rich-quick scheme, but it’s one of the hardest careers one can take. You may spend years trading but that does not translate to profitability. Many people give up at this point in time. Always remember do not over leverage and over risk your account. Staying consistent and keeping your account alive is the only way for you to succeed in getting your mindset right. So what if you win $10,000 on one trade by over risking your account? If you condition your mindset to go all in, you will find yourself unable to progress and keep blowing up your accounts.

There is no shortcut to psychology. You have to really experience it yourself. You can listen to motivational and psychology talks, videos or courses. They all talk about the same thing. You can only learn them yourself by trusting your trading system over a long period of time.

The best mindset to have is relentless pursuit of knowledge, self mastery and knowing how to adapt.

These are things that you can only attain through spending time, mostly- failing. This is the hardest thing to accept about trading, it goes against the very essence of our nature, you are fighting millions of years of natural selection, hard coded into your DNA- to win. You will lose money at the start. Of course, demo/paper trading first will avoid this problem, however too few people don't really understand what they're up against. What's rule No.1 of winning something? Knowing your opponent. Let me elaborate.

Most people here want to trade on one of the most efficient markets in the history of mankind, Forex. Think about that for a second. All information gets priced in instantly, with huge computational resources at hand to mathematically give pretty much a guaranteed edge no matter what. I would say forex is a losing game to even begin with, and that there are better assets to trade, but that's just me- not to burst your bubbles but there some things you should know:

- The Forex market is incredibly liquid, meaning- efficient. So any predictions for future price movements aka "strategies", will not work after some time. Any strings of wins is purely down to chance. Need I explain this?
- If you do find something that has potential to consistently create profits, your orders will eventually be flagged as outliers and will be targeted by MMs, Brokers, Liquidity providers, Algo traders, HFTS, Quants, Hedge funds etc. Now that Ai and Machine learning are advancing in their capabilities, there is no way you can go under the radar of pattern recognition, data mining and statistical analysis. They have PhD Quantitative's/Mathematicians on a huge payroll just for this. You really thought you could outplay the system because of some lines on a chart? Think again.

Its the same reason why banks and institutions use algos that split their orders up in £100k worth lots and deploy every 1 min within an hour. They don't want to get seen, they don't want to move the markets. They primarily use forex to act as market makers and profiting off the spread, occasionally scalping quick profits off informed decisions (they can see the entire markets orders). Some of you may already know this, some of you may have worked in these industries, some of you may not have a clue of what the market is actually doing or who is participating, but this leads me on my next point-

Dunning-Kruger effect- a cognitive bias where individuals overestimate their own abilities and underestimate the abilities of others.

This effect, the same thing responsible for many traders thinking that they have a special ability to beat the market, is also responsible for the "one small fish in a big pond" mindset, that their trading activity is too insignificant to be noticed or exploited by others. This can result in traders underestimating the sophistication and power of these market participants, who have access to vast amounts of data and advanced algorithms that can detect and exploit "outliers" aka profitable trading strategies.

My advice would be to anyone here who takes trading serious is this-
- If you want to be consistently profitable, efficient markets forex will not give you this, you will be a consistent loser, inefficient but effective markets like indices/stocks are better for the long term. The more effort you put into find a consistent strategy, the higher the chance of identifying an edge/pattern/behaviour that can be exploited.
- In terms of probability, if by chance you happen to find a statiscally significant market inefficiency in an efficient market, congrats, you have found an edge. Now you must execute this edge before it gets made efficient by the market. How exactly would you do this? From experience, hide your SL/TP (SL is still an order to fill by liquidity), don't use too much leverage (Prime brokers, banks will get interested very fast etc), use at least 2-3 brokers and alternate between them (for example 1 week Broker A, week 2 broker B etc) since your trading account ID is tagged with your orders.
- Be adaptable. What worked last month may not work today, traders who are able to consistently create profits have mastered themselves and their craft. They know exactly what their strategy is doing, the purpose and why the edge works. Executing it however requires adaptability, meaning, taking what the market gives, not getting fearful or greedy.

Many traders would think, if they found a consistent strategy, they'd just leverage and compound their account as quick as possible, and while this is true, realistically it isn't due to the reasons above. So your mindset must be long term growth rather than short term gains. But all of these things are quite far away from most traders minds, to even get to that point to begin with, like worrying about your consistently profitable strategy becoming redundant. Just don't skip/cheat yourself, because it will end up biting you later on. There are many more insights to share but I'm just one guy, at the end of the day, trading is a dog eat dog world, the sooner you realise everyone is your enemy, the better.

I think EA can make up for the wrong decisions caused by emotions
96% EA + 4% human intervention is the safest solution
Of course, it is impossible to be risk-free in the market
What we have to do is to reduce the risk as much as possible while ensuring a certain profit

I also believe that if one cannot control oneself, using an EA is the best choice as it has no human emotions. It is best to separate manually traded accounts from EA trading accounts, and choose the appropriate trading method based on one's own trading strategy and risk preference.

You need to realize that losses and failures are not a tragedy, but a great possibility learn from it, gain valuable experience and gradually grow professionally. Losses are the best teachers if:
- you restrict them
- you carefully analyze what caused them
- you constantly change your approach to trading, while never ceasing controlling your risks until you get better results

Checklist and repetition.
be like a pilot, read the list and see if that is available in the chart. If all is check, do it. Else, do not. Keep repeating it and you have consistency.

That is all.

I am having trouble the trades i set up i dont enter but the trades i dont setup i enter i have back tested this for a whole week on trading view and with a live chart wit demo money 2 weeks ago i lost 2500 just opening an closing trades like i have a good strat but i am still stuck in my hold habits like wtf its annoying me so much becasue i can see the where it is going i set it up then i dont enter i just dont know what to do at this point man this week i have only entered 10 trades with live acount and out of that 5 were losses an 5 were profits but the 5 i lost i didnt even set up the trades i just traded of the candle and not the structure like i want to make it so bad man i havent been really seeing my son for awhile just to get this right, i know i can make but sometimes the procces just goes over my head and i want to do what ever the candle is doing.