You have a responsibility to be prepared mentally each day you choose to day trade. Many traders shun the emotional realities of trading, and this aspect of trading is among the most important. Recent findings in scientific studies reveal, unequivocally, that a traders emotional state during a trading session may be the single most important factor in determining whether a trader has a successful day or loses money.
In my experience the best way to quiet a group of chatting traders is to ask them about their emotional preparation to trading. For a variety of reasons, traders are reluctant to discuss how they feel, at the emotional level, during their trading. Whether the root cause of the this phenomena is vanity, inability or reluctance to share emotional tendencies, or a societal norm for traders to be mentally “tough” is unclear. What is clear, however, is the incontrovertible evidence that states that your mental and emotional state has a profound effect on your ability to trade.
That being said, most of the successful trading systems share some common characteristics and very little has occurred in the past ten years that we could consider revolutionary breakthroughs in trading technique. To be sure, no trading style has in any way pulled ahead of the pack of mainstream traders. Sure, we have new styles of trading, but the ultimate judge of trading successfully is profits and losses, and the new styles have done anything but disproved the long standing tenets of trading with their profits and losses.
