Emotions in Trading: 7 Resources on How to Control Them
Your emotions in trading are one of the main reasons I believe is what separates a successful trader from one who spends thousands of dollars with “gurus” trying to learn the holy grail of trading.
How to control my emotions when trading is something I still struggle with today but I have improved a ton from when I first started.
But it didn’t happen overnight, as mentioned above I still battle the emotions of fear and greed in a lot of trades. The key was to meditate and begin the process of tapping into my subconscious. To start programming myself to trust the trade setups that I created.
That is the biggest point, create the setups you trust.
The easiest way to get there is to tap into your subconscious mind through meditation. This is how I have discovered all of my trading setups that get better with each discovery.
So the biggest step to controlling your emotions in trading is to start meditating. Create the setups that you trust and then keep refining them until you know without a doubt that they will work for you.
If you do that then you will have taken control of your emotions in trading but it doesn’t end there. You have to constantly be on guard.
Fear and greed are the two emotions that still tug at me in a lot of the trades I enter. Just this past week they hit me extra hard because I had created a setup that I liked but once I started trading live with it I knew there were a couple of more situations I needed to iron out before the setup was truly ready for use.
That is when fear and greed struck. They know when you have the slightest doubt and they will try and wreak havoc. Fortunately, I recognized what was going on and pulled the trade in order to go back and refine the setup.
A big part of learning from me is through others. Then I take what I learned from them and adjust it to work for me. So in this post, I am going to list the books and people I have used that have helped me out in one way or another with my emotions in trading.
There will be products listed throughout this article. Some of them may be affiliate links for products I have personally used and recommended.
Economic Resources to Control Your Emotions In Trading
Frank Kinslow – The Secret of Quantum Living
This was one of the first books I read that provided a clear and simple method to meditate. In my post “How to be a Profitable Trader Using Meditation” https://evancarthey.com/how-to-become-a-profitable-trader-using-meditation/ I go over in detail about how I meditate and how this book helped shaped my meditation practice.
You’ll find over the course of this article that the people who are the most affordable and have helped me the most do not have anything to do with trading.
They are involved in other aspects of their careers and none of them trade.
Frank’s book is simple and easy to read which teaches you how to watch your thoughts. That is basically all you do.
Wait for your thoughts to arise, then when they do all you do is simply observe them until they fade away.
Eventually, you will either find silence or you will begin to experience a feeling (he calls it the eufeeling) of calmness or positivity.
The goal is to touch on it throughout the day and then let it go. You don’t try to force the eufeeling or the gaps between your thoughts.
Either is fine but the goal is to continually go back to that place and do this anytime you have a question or issues in your life arise.
This is what I did when I first started meditating and is how I developed and continue to develop and refine my trades. This method really helped my emotions in trading because I now have a plan on how to lower my fear or greed when I am in a trade.
Here is the book below if you which to purchase it, the book is well worth the small investment and is one of the best books that have influenced my life for the better:
Kenny Werner – Effortless Mastery
Kenny is a jazz musician who used meditation to transform his life. I wrote an in-depth article about him and his teachings because they gel very well with Frank Kinslow’s book as mentioned above.
https://evancarthey.com/kenny-werner-effortless-mastery-book-review-not-just-for-musicians/
Kenny’s book, Effortless Mastery is a masterpiece and provides new insight into meditation and how easy it is to practice.
The key to meditation is its simplicity of it. You do not need to contort your body and go on a 2-week chakra cleanse to tap into your subconscious to become a better trader.
All it takes is to simply observe your thoughts, then when you put into practice the ideas that came to you, you do so without judgment.
That is the basis of what Kenny teaches.
To operate from your subconscious and not judge how you perform.
You take it step-by-step when learning to play from your subconscious. He would literally only practice until he could put one
The beauty of this is you perform from a place of total relaxation which is your subconscious. When you train yourself to do this then your results will be taken to the next level.
This is something I continue to work on because it is hard for me to wait and be patient before trying anything. I want to charge ahead full steam.
But Kenny teaches you to wait and play/perform from your subconscious. Even if you can only do it for 2 seconds. Stop and then start again until you can do 3 seconds and so on and so on.
You can do this for any area of my life.
What I do for my trading is to sit and wait (using Frank Kinslow’s meditation method) until I get the gap between my thoughts or the eufeeling hits. Then I start looking at the charts for my setup.
If I am being patient then I will stop as soon as I know I am trying to force looking for setups and make something happen that is not there.
So I go back to waiting on my subconscious and begin the process again. The more you do it the better you get and the easier it becomes.
Simple, simple.
I highly recommend Kenny’s book. Between Frank and Kenny’s book, I am very confident you will make amazing strides in all areas of your life if you implement their meditation practices. Especially with your emotions in trading.
Help Control Your Emotions in Trading Through Professionals
Steve Ira Present
Steve is the first professional I used which was the craziest experience I have had. I’ve written in-depth about him before:
Steve Ira Present and His Trading Psychology Help 2019 Update
You can find him on these websites:
http://www.rescueyourtrading.com/
https://www.tradingpsychologyhelp.com/
I still haven’t figured out how he does what he does. Let me explain.
When you have a session with him it is over the phone.
He chats with you about experiences you have had (mainly from your teen or childhood years) that have created emotional responses in your life that you want to change.
So he has you sit there and think about that experience. Then you rate the emotions it brings on a scale of 1 – 10.
Next, he has you sit there silently while he does whatever he does on the other side of the phone. All I could hear when he was doing whatever it was he was doing was some heavy breathing from time to time.
After a couple of minutes in silence, he asks you to bring up the memory and rate how strong the emotional level has become.
What is crazy is almost every time it had gone down. If it wasn’t at a level of 1-2 then he would do it again. Then a couple of minutes later he would ask me to rate the emotional level on it and after two times it was always somewhere between 1-2.
But the really crazy part is while he was doing whatever he was doing over the phone I could literally feel the blocks of emotion melt away in my heart. It was like those pent-up negative emotions where a stick of butter that I put in the microwave.
Then when I turn the microwave on it begins to melt away. The emotions that I had tied to the experience did the same, that is the best analogy I could think of about his method.
In the post I linked above that I wrote as a review of Steve Ira, I go into greater detail regarding the method he uses.
He is the most expensive out of everyone I will list here. He charges around $750/hour so if you have disposable income then he would be worth it. If not then I have some other options below that work extremely well.
But the overall theme is to use these professionals to eliminate the negative subconscious beliefs that control your emotions in trading through a negative pattern.
They are like weeds you are pulling from your brain so your garden can grow to its full potential.
John Cutujar
John is very similar to Steve Ira Present because he deals with eliminating negative beliefs you have in your subconscious mind. I’ve noticed a difference with my emotions in trading.
You can find him at https://www.dynamicbeliefs.com/
But I like him better than Steve for several reasons.
The first reason is he is WAY less expensive. He charges $150/hour (at the time of this writing). So right there you could get over 4 hours with John for 1 hour with Steve.
Secondly, he replaces your negative beliefs after he removes them with positive beliefs. Steve only eliminates negative beliefs.
Thirdly, you are involved in the process. Although it was nice to sit there and do nothing with Steve’s sessions it also felt kind of weird because I always felt like I should be doing something.
With John, he does muscle testing to determine if the belief you are working on is out of whack.
If you have ever heard of Brent Phillips then John comes from that school of subconscious teachings.
What he did with me is he had me stand up with my knees slightly bent and my weight centered over my feet. Then he would ask me a couple of questions to calibrate myself and I would answer. If I agreed with the answer I would rock forward, if I didn’t I would rock backward. He gave me some questions to start that were intentionally wrong in order to make sure my body was calibrated correctly.
Then he went to work. We would discuss what I wanted to change and also replace it with. So he would start down a path asking questions until he found a belief somewhere in the midst of my subconscious that was out of whack. He would get rid of it or tune it up and then test it again until it was correct.
Sometimes he found beliefs I had that I never would have thought of. He goes into great detail and exhausts every path with the belief I was looking to change. He’ll even go slightly over the 1-hour of allotted time to ensure everything is taken care of for that session and he’ll give you videos or books to read after the session.
He’s really responsive to emails as well and he reviewed a couple of theta tracks on YouTube in order to let me know if they were worthwhile to use while meditating.
I’ve used John’s services for 4 sessions so far and I will use them again when the beliefs I have changed catch up to the results I will achieve.
The first time I called him (he does all of his sessions through the phone) we were chatting and he was telling me what he does. We were seeing if his services would work with what I was looking to do.
I told him I was looking to improve my trading as well as other areas of my life.
After about 10 minutes of chatting with him, I felt this jolt of energy go through my body. At the time I was standing and leaning on a railing. When I felt the jolt of energy it caused me to stand straight up. I interrupted John because he was talking at the time and told him what happened.
He apologized and said he downloaded a positive thinking subconscious belief pattern to me and usually only does so after asking someone’s permission to do so. I knew then that his services were legit and signed up to try them out.
John is someone I highly recommend. In my opinion, he is very affordable and the changes I’ve seen in my life and my emotions in trading have been amazing. Check him out if you have any interest at all in removing your negative subconscious beliefs and replacing them with positive beliefs.
Dr. Kenneth Reid
Dr. Reid is the person with who I have the least amount of experience. You can find his website here: https://www.daytradingpsychology.com/.
I have used one of his programs before which was one where you simply listen to his instructions as he guides your conscious mind. It was his Mastermind Pro series: https://mastermind.daytradingpsychology.com/.
A friend had purchased it and let me listen to a couple of his tracks to see what I thought. To be honest, in my opinion, it isn’t worth the $497 he is charging for it.
The advice is solid that he gives but I would much rather spend 3 hours with John Cutujar and let him do the work of eliminating my negative subconscious beliefs as well as programing my mind for success.
Dr. Reid does have a program that is intriguing which is his Positive Trading Psychology for Traders: https://www.daytradingpsychology.com/positive-neuroprogramming-for-traders/
A couple of weeks ago I began reciting positive affirmations in the mirror before I went to bed each night and I can tell a big difference in my thoughts, my emotions in trading, and outlook on life. I was reading about a French psychologist Emile Coue who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion that I will talk about in the next section.
Dr. Reid has a program that focuses on this aspect in dealing with positive psychology. His “Training a Winning Mindset” mp3 clears negativity, installs positive beliefs, and trains your brain to remain clear-minded in the face of adversity.
He also offers other coaching programs that range from around $300 to $5,000. Without any proof of him being a profitable trader then I could not see myself purchasing any coaching from him.
I listed him because I do think the Mastermind program is decent, but at $497 it is very steeply priced and I think you can find better value elsewhere such as with John Cutajar or even the book from Kenny Werner or Frank Kinslow.
Previously I wrote an article about him because I agree with what he says that you have to trust your trading style 100%: https://evancarthey.com/dr-kenneth-reid-confirms-said-earlier-trust-trading-style-100-2/
Emile Coue
Emile Coue passed away in 1926 but I wanted to include him here because his method of self-improvement based upon optimistic autosuggestion is an area that I have found to be vitally important to my recent positive outlook on life and my emotions in trading.
I utilize his method on my drive to work every morning because it is so simple to do and I also try to do it as I lay in bed before I drift off to sleep.
Here is the basis of the Emile Coue method taken from here: http://singlehappyandstrong.com/the-emile-coue-method-for-affirmations/
This is the Emile Coue´ method:
1. Sit in a relaxed position with eyes closed.
2. Repeat in a monotonous tone, the magic words:
“EVERY DAY, IN EVERY WAY, I AM GETTING BETTER AND BETTER”
3. Repeat these magic words 20 times in the morning and 20 times in the evening.
4. Do not think about your illness or your troubles while repeating these words.
5. Your desire must have absolute faith and confidence.That is it! This is simple to do. You do not need any special props or need to be in any particular place. What you do need is confidence in yourself and to believe firmly that all will be well.
Try it for a month. See if there are some positive changes in your life.
I also purchased the book Simple Self Healing and the author that goes into detail about Emile Coue and his method because I wanted to learn more. But the 5 steps above are plenty to go forward and start having positive autosuggestions influence your life for the better.
Emile Coue’s method cannot be overlooked, in fact, I highly recommend you start using it today.
Putting It All Together in Order to Control Your Emotions in Trading
I know I used the word “control” a lot regarding your emotions in trading. In truth, you cannot control your emotions in trading but you can work with them and not have them work against you.
That is why meditation can help you even if you do not trade which is why I recommend it to everyone.
There are two avenues you can go down when meditating.
- Focus on your thoughts until they quiet
- Focus on your emotions until they quiet
Focusing on your emotions is usually much more intense. There will be times when you meditate that emotions spring up and that is perfectly fine.
When that happens what you want to do is not fight them but observe them just like you would your thoughts. But let me give you a heads-up, it can be very intense.
The information I provided above with the books and professionals can assist you with your emotions in trading. Whether they arise from your thoughts or other emotions doesn’t matter.
What matters is you have a plan or strategy in place to be proactive and deal with them. This is an aspect most traders don’t realize but is the most important.
In trading, your emotions can make or break a trade which over time can break your account. Fear and greed are the driving emotions of trading.
They will destroy you if you do not learn to identify them and have the plan to deal with them.
If your emotions in trading have led you to know you need additional help then please let me know because I am here to assist you on your trading journey.
