Managing anxiety

... do not dream! Trading is more gambling as gambling itselfs. Why? Trading sound more serious and gambling all know must be more risky. Is that true? I hvae my point on this for sure.
Now back ... it is more than 1001 systems avaible, if not ask AI for more informations on it.
Watch the chart! See you flatline? The answer here is not easy, depends on thickness of the line. But i mean see you something on the chart? If so, you can trade it. Price moving up, price moving down. Enter the markets are easy. Managing risk is the problem and this will lead to anxiety!
You will have this as long as you have no clue how to manage risk. How go ot of this?
Seriously, become a gambler! Trade like someone in a casino! Ask how they earn profit and what are they money management skills are. If you done this, came back to trading and prepare a good set of money management AND the suitable trading method.

Do you not really like my post. That is okay, BUT i will you give you in a year the chance to revisit my post. So take it to you favourits.

.. in short i pick my years end present ...



.. can only be done without be a "trader", making profit like a gambler ...
be sure you work on money management next year and years behind 2025 ... takes time and a good amount of work ... be sure!

Yeah, a trader with the courage of a gambler.

**"Managing trading anxiety is something I’ve struggled with too. One thing that helped me was keeping a ‘confidence journal’—basically tracking my trades, the reasoning behind them, and reviewing them later. When I see that my strategy works over time, it reduces the urge to micromanage or second-guess myself.
I’ve also found that proper risk management makes a huge difference. Once I started trading with money I was truly comfortable losing, the emotional impact dropped significantly.
Curious to hear from others—do you use any mindset techniques or routines that help keep emotions in check?"**

I was struggling with trading anxiety for some time. I started discussing my pain points with other traders on similar forums and I've been good so far.

Xanax doesn't work. While effective initially, the brain chemistry adapts within days to a week. Increasing the dose puts to sleep. Quitting it leads to increased irritability for a couple of days.

I manage my anxiety by going for a swim. In terms of biology, it releases endorphins and helps to take my mind off trading.

I do a similar thing. I like to go for a run. It really helps with the mind and the body. After that I feel refreshed and can refocus.

1. I agree that trading involves significant risks and that proper risk management is essential to avoid turning trading into gambling.
2. Viewing trading as a disciplined game of probabilities, rather than pure luck, can help align expectations and improve long-term profitability.
3. The analogy to casino gambling underscores the need for a systematic approach, discipline, and psychological resilience
   so for me first thing is
   1. define your trading goal
   2.choose a trading style
   3.develop a trading strategy that works for your personality
   4. risk management rule (daily profit and loss)
   5. record keeping
   6. psychological discipline
   hope this make sense

In the beginning I found that my issue was not being confident in my strategy. I learned 30-40 different ways to extract money, this indicator plus that indicator, internet forecasts etc. When i would place a trade, I was so lost as to how I even made that decision my anxiety went through the roof. I didnt have a strategy that fit my personality, the times in which i was available to trade and unrealistic ICT 10r screenshots that made me feel like i was doing something wrong. FORGET ALL OF IT. Find the piece of the puzzle that works for you. Stay off youtube. Dont rely on lag indicators, the chart tells you all you need to know. If I stick to my trading plan and only execute when the boxes are checked my anxiety vanishes. If it goes wrong at least I checked those boxes.

Lastly please please only trade with an amount of money you are comfortable with watching vanish before your eyes. Pay your rent, pay your bills, have another source of income and enjoy trading. This will absolutely wreck your mental health day in and day out if you dont stick to a plan. Someone mentioned early that trading is 10% strategy 90% emotions. I completely agree. There is a reason that a million strategies will work to some degree when the market presents a setup. Your emotions, entires and exits and keeping your fundamentals strong is the only path to profitability. No one is flipping a $50 account to 10k. The quicker you realize compounding small profits wins big. The “easier” this will get.

Good luck this week everyone!

I know this is an old thread, but I felt it’s such an important topic to keep up as well.

I started around 2012 with trading, it took me a long time to work out exactly how my style was going to be used, and that somehow had the effect on my nerve count when placing a trade, one thing that helped me was dull music in the background, it sounds ridiculous but it really did work, allowed me not to get wound up in what I was doing, and allowed me to plan a bit more, but also enjoy it.

It’s one of the reasons I’m actually starting a fresh persona with it all, and placing it all down on a screen, to head back to where I started and see what actually worked when handing all the stress… also stepping away when placing the trade is my usual second go to, if your SL’s are there, why watch the screen all the time!

I hope some of that helps, albeit late to the party

Ben (TheTradingDad)

I'm realizing that without the right mindset, it's easy to panic and second-guess trades. I’m trying to stay focused and disciplined even when things get stressful

1. Have a system that you've proven works in real time (not just back-tested),
2. watch the economic calendar, less so the actual news, avoid news trades if you are prone to anxiety,
3. once you have a proven system always size correctly to further manage risk,
4. do not graze the forums nor the news prior to trading as this may feed your confirmation bias and can cost you,
5. plan exits as carefully as entries as part of your system...

Once it is boringly profitable, the anxiety will be minimized. Takes a while. Be patient with yourself, and as another member stated elsewhere "....stop wasting money and time".
I'd apply that in real-world conditions as trading in a demo account only until consistent, (not wasting money) and continuing to refine your system once consistently profitable, being open to new approaches.

I think by far the single commonest reason for people trading with anxiety is that deep down, they know that they don’t really understand how to prove, for themselves, with a high degree of confidence, whether or not their trading method has a genuine, proven, robust edge (positive expectation) over the market, and therefore they’re really just "trading on hope".

Even if they know that only subconsciously (and that‘s pretty "deep down"?), it’s still going to make them pretty anxious.

I think the answer to all those very common problems is to be found in books about probability and statistics, not in books (or websites or videos) about psychology or meditation or whatever.

But people like to imagine and pretend otherwise, and there are whole industries out there (and some of them "in here," as well as "out there"!) who know from long experience that "psychology stuff" sells well and easily while "statistics stuff" sells only badly and with difficulty.

So people’s misleading and mistaken impressions about the causes of their anxiety, and how to deal with it, get colluded with and reinforced and magnified all the time.

Most people don’t want ever to have to step far enough outside their comfort-zone to understand that they need statistical education (because that feels difficult and unpleasant and counterintuitive) rather than psychology tricks (because those are popular and comfortable and feel natural and everyone else is talking about that, too).

So, realistically, their problems as measured by money in the bank (and that’s what we’re trading for, isn’t it?) often tend to get worse, rather than better.
But people don’t like hearing this.