How to become a profitable trader using meditation

The one aspect of trading that no one wants you to know about is your emotions. In this post “How to become a profitable trader using meditation,” I will show why your emotions are tied to meditation and how they can improve your trading.

People pay lip service to it but not many people devote as much time to their psychological makeup as they do their trading system. The reason why is because it isn’t as easy to market to the masses by the charlatans that sell the vast majority of the trading courses. It is much easier to package a “proprietary” indicator and show charts from the past at how perfect the indicator works! It’s like printing money! This post will teach you how to become a profitable trader using meditation.

At most the psychological aspect might have a chapter in a book that mentions it but there are very few products that tackle it and give it the attention it deserves.  The most well-known product is Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas.  It’s a great book that is easy to read and is a great primer in how your psychology determines how you trade. The key to all of this is meditation.

How to become a profitable trader using meditation
How to become a profitable trader using meditation

Square Peg in a Round Hole for How to become a profitable trader using meditation

The reason why almost everyone fails in their trading journey is they try to follow other people’s trading systems rather than creating their own. A big reason why you rarely ever see testimonials with financial statements from people who pay to be in a trading room is that almost all of those people lose money.

That is why you hardly ever see a trading room post verified trade statements because the owner(s) of the trading room do not make a profit trading. This is why trading books and trading courses are extremely profitable. It is all glitz and glamour but no proof of profit. It makes people feel good to purchase a trading course because they think this time they will learn how to be profitable and that you have found a teacher to take you to the holy land of profits. You are trying to force another trading style to fit your psychology. 99.9 out of 100 times you will fail.

Sadly almost all of the time you are buying information from someone who is just as unprofitable or even more unprofitable than you are. The difference between you and them is they know they can’t make money trading but they can act like they do in order to fool others into buying their products and services. The trading industry is the easiest industry to show your profits but yet almost no one does so when they are selling their product or service.

Trading-Psychology
Trading-Psychology

Look Within Not Without

What most people don’t realize is you have to discover what is inside you and how to trade based upon your psychological makeup. For years I was one of the people who purchased countless books, trading courses and spent way too much money in failing trading rooms. I was still spinning my gears until a friend of mine showed me how meditation changed him into being a profitable trader.

The meditation is simple. It is simply silencing your conscious mind so you can listen to your sub-conscious. That is where your creativity will come from and that is the key to finding the trading style that works for you. How to become a profitable trader using meditation is not difficult but it does take effort and work. It is something you have to do. No system or “coach” can do it for you.

Your conscious mind is designed to keep you safe for better or for worse. It is the power behind all of your thoughts that go through your head all day and night. I am convinced that is a big reason why most people are upset with themselves and life. They are controlled by their conscious mind, I know I have been. It’s not your fault though, most people don’t know any better. No one teaches us how to quiet our conscious mind in order to listen to that still small voice inside all of us.

RIP My Friend who taught me how to become a profitable trader using meditation

My friend who I talk about often in my posts passed away years ago very suddenly. He said he was having some medical issues and asked for prayers. A couple of weeks later when he never responded to my emails I knew something bad had happened. In a closed trading group, I was in with 4 other people one of the guys found his obituary. That was a sad day.

We first met through a trading forum where I had started a trading journal when I was using Mack’s Price Action Trading System as my trading style. He saw my journal and coincidentally he had also just left a crappy trading room which was the same one I had just left. He also was trying out Mack’s trading system.

We hit it off right away and talked almost daily through email regarding trading and eventually psychology.

He was the one who showed me how meditation changed his life and made him a profitable trader. At first, I didn’t care about meditating, I just wanted to keep studying in order to find the right trading system.

Even though that had never worked in the past it was all I knew and I am hard headed. He kept encouraging me to start meditating. Finally, after a while, I agreed and started.

That is when everything started changing.

Soon after starting to meditate I began to have breakthroughs. I started trying new trading ideas. Most didn’t work but each time I tried them it brought me one step closer to figuring what worked for me. I quit trying to learn and follow other people’s trading systems and focused on myself.

Each night I would meditate for 30 – 60 minutes. Some nights new ideas would pop into my head. Some nights no new ideas came. But the more I meditated the better I felt.

The Breakthrough Due to Meditation

Finally around March of 2016 I had my breakthrough. Here is the chart below:

monthly gain
monthly gain

As you can see I then blew it all a couple of months later which was terrible but that was all my fault due to being over leveraged. My greed got the best of me. I felt I had to keep on making a greater amount of money each month.

That was my downfall and an expensive lesson to learn. For years I had been striving to be profitable that when I finally became profitable I let greed overtake me. I learned just because you become profitable doesn’t mean you stop meditating. In fact, you should meditate more the more successful you become.

But the point I am trying to make is from July 2015 to February 2016 I was unprofitable in trading the Forex market. Then in March 2016 I had my breakthrough and found the first trading style that worked for me.

I went through old emails and pinpointed when I started meditating seriously and it was on December 29, 2015. It was not a coincidence that in December 2015 when I finally started focusing on making meditation 1st and quit trying to learn other systems that soon after I became profitable.

Two months after I started focusing on meditating for my trading I then became profitable. It was an amazing feeling!

Earlier this year I started trading Forex again and here are my results so far:

Forex current - How to become a profitable trader using meditation
Forex current – How to become a profitable trader using meditation

I’ve started off small ($2,000 deposit) to ensure I learned from my last mistake. I am only allowed 50:1 leverage since I am going through a US regulated broker (Thanks US government! <sarcasm>) Previously I had been with an offshore broker who gave me 400:1 leverage.

For my stock trading last year I made a little over $700. Obviously, that isn’t a ton of money but you have to realize before I had never once in my life been profitable at the end of the year trading stocks (10+ years).

This year I am currently up around$2,400 with about two months left in the year. Again, that isn’t a ton of money but what if I keep up at the current pace and triple or quadruple my account each year? I would be more than happy with doubling it each year. But my main focus is to NOT BE OVER LEVERAGED like I was last time. So far so good.

How I Meditate

What I am going to share with you is what I believe to be the single most important key to my trading success. This is how I turned a lifetime of losing money each month trading into profitability within 2 months.

You can use this for anything you want to specifically improve in your life but if you want to transform your trading the fastest then do a session for this each day for 15 – 60 minutes per day.

  1. Read The Secret of Quantum Living by Frank Kinslow – This is the basis for my meditation. You observe your thoughts until they quiet down and then observe the gaps that form in place of your thoughts. That’s it, simple simple. When you are observing the gaps then you are in the right state of mind.
  2. Have a year’s worth of charts loaded, what you are looking for is to be able to press the right arrow on your keyboard and scroll uninterrupted for a couple of minutes.
  3. Once you are observing the gaps and are relaxed (usually takes me 10-15 minutes to get to that point) then open your eyes.
  4. Tell your subconscious mind “Show me something new.” Then look at the middle of your monitor and press the right arrow key for your chart to start scrolling.
  5. Stare into the middle of your monitor and keep observing your thoughts or gaps (they will change back and forth)
  6. Do not worry about noticing anything on your charts, your subconscious is catching everything.
  7. Once you reach the end of the scrolling then press the left arrow key and scroll back through the chart
  8. After you do this for 10-20 minutes then take a break
  9. You’ll start to receive new trading ideas either immediately or overtime
  10. Whatever ideas come into your mind write them down and then implement them (demo or very small live trading lots)
  11. Most won’t work but what you are doing is getting yourself closer to finding out what works for you
  12. Eventually, you will have whittled away what doesn’t work and you will discover what does
  13. When that happens then congratulations, you have reached a HUGE milestone
  14. I recommend to not stop once you have found what works for you, keep going
  15. Keep meditating and screen-scrolling, you’ll find better and better entries/exits and trading styles that work for you
  16. I’m now on my 3rd trading style that works even better than my first 2, the first discovery set the foundation for me, the 2nd worked even better and now the 3rd works the best (I’m sure there will be a fourth on the way)

Conclusion for How to become a profitable trader using meditation

So go start meditating, it will change your life for the better. In just about every way possible.

P.S. – There is a meditation program I have begun listening to while I meditate. It is supposed to get you even further into your desired state and help your brainwaves. I plan on trying it out for a couple of months because it is a 6-month program. If I feel it is worth it then I will write an article about it. But if it doesn’t help then you’ll never hear me mention it again. I only recommend products or services that have worked for me.

Popular Links

Here are a couple of links if you are looking at how I view the market and with my trade setups as well as products I like and use.

Robinhood Trading Broker Review

If this post benefits you and if you haven’t used Robinhood for trading stocks but are thinking to then please consider using my referral link when you do sign up: http://share.robinhood.com/evanc203

This way each of us will receive a free share of a random stock if you sign up through my referral link.

My Robinhood Review:  https://evancarthey.com/review-robinhood-trading-service-with-no-fees-part-1/

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10 comments

  • cyril

    Hello Mr Carthey,
    thank you for your honest insight. I’m just throwing this out there to get a general idea of the journey ahead (never traded but currently studying). My questions to you is if you could start over with the knowledge you have now. would you start off mediating and understanding the psychology of the market before learning to trade? what advice would you give to you younger self?

    • A

      Hi Cyril, I would focus on meditating. I wasted so many hours trying to learn other trading systems that did nothing but get me better at losing money. It wasn’t until I started meditating and searching within for answers did things start to change in the positive. It still is a lot of work but it is the fastest path to profitability and the only one that worked for me.

  • Awesome insight. Been getting heavily into Wim Hof and meditating. My trading is positively in the shitter. I will start w Mack and go forward. Thank you for this site.

  • Thanks. This has been super helpful

  • Evan, Thanks for your blog. Was that person Ray? He was a great guy and very generous. Thanks. Bart

  • Isacc

    I am going to try to meditate to improve my trading from today. Thanks for the info.

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