Skip to main content

Meeting the Challenge of Secondary Frustration

One of the most common emotional challenges faced by traders is frustration.  Frustration can cause us to lose our focus.  It can lead us to make rash, impulsive decisions.  Little wonder that traders hope to trade in a zen mode, completely emotion free.

As long as we care about trading outcomes, however, there can be no emotion-free trading.  Nor would freedom from emotion be desirable for traders.  The emotional processing of events that can lead to frustration is also what gives us our *feel* for markets.  One successful trader I've known for a while uses his emotional reactions to provide him with insight on how other market participants might be feeling in a given situation.  For him, emotions are information.

Frustration can also be a motivator.  It occurs when we are blocked in our pursuit of goals.  When we channel frustration to better understand and overcome obstacles, we've turned frustration into a positive and essential part of success.

Indeed, I would argue that frustration is not a problem for traders and, in fact, is an inevitable trading outcome at times.  The problem is what we can call secondary frustration:  our frustration with being frustrated.  In other words, it's when we make it not OK to feel normal frustration--when we become threatened by frustration and try to push it away--that we're most likely to let it get the better of us.  Fully accepting and experiencing a feeling defuses its power and intensity.  When we hold ourselves to an unrealistic zen ideal and fail to accept frustration, our feelings redouble: we're now frustrated *and* we're frustrated with being frustrated.

Secondary anxiety is a big part of what keeps panic attacks going.  When people become afraid of normal stress and nervousness, their anxiety redoubles.  Interestingly, it's the calm acceptance of anxiety that gets us past fear.  The same is true for frustration and many seemingly negative emotions.  Making ourselves conscious of them and becoming their observer enables us to separate ourselves from what we're feeling and gain control over our state.  Identifying with our feelings is the surest way of allowing them to control us.

The emotionally intelligent trader can prepare for frustration, fear, greed, and other seemingly disruptive states.  By anticipating them, rehearsing our response to them, and channeling their energy constructively, we turn our experience into a powerful trading asset.

Further Reading:  The Basic Cause of Emotional Problems in Trading
.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Benefits Of Healthy eating Turmeric every day for the body

One teaspoon of turmeric a day to prevent inflammation, accumulation of toxins, pain, and the outbreak of cancer.  Yes, turmeric has been known since 2.5 centuries ago in India, as a plant anti-inflammatory / inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and also have a good detox properties, now proven to prevent Alzheimer's disease and cancer. Turmeric prevents inflammation:  For people who
Post a Comment
Read more

Women and children overboard

It's the  Catch-22  of clinical trials: to protect pregnant women and children from the risks of untested drugs....we don't test drugs adequately for them. In the last few decades , we've been more concerned about the harms of research than of inadequately tested treatments for everyone, in fact. But for "vulnerable populations,"  like pregnant women and children, the default was to exclude them. And just in case any women might be, or might become, pregnant, it was often easier just to exclude us all from trials. It got so bad, that by the late 1990s, the FDA realized regulations and more for pregnant women - and women generally - had to change. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) took action too. And so few drugs had enough safety and efficacy information for children that, even in official circles, children were being called "therapeutic orphans."  Action began on that, too. There is still a long way to go. But this month there was a sign that
Post a Comment
Read more

Not a word was spoken (but many were learned)

Video is often used in the EFL classroom for listening comprehension activities, facilitating discussions and, of course, language work. But how can you exploit silent films without any language in them? Since developing learners' linguistic resources should be our primary goal (well, at least the blogger behind the blog thinks so), here are four suggestions on how language (grammar and vocabulary) can be generated from silent clips. Split-viewing Split-viewing is an information gap activity where the class is split into groups with one group facing the screen and the other with their back to the screen. The ones facing the screen than report on what they have seen - this can be done WHILE as well as AFTER they watch. Alternatively, students who are not watching (the ones sitting with their backs to the screen) can be send out of the classroom and come up with a list of the questions to ask the 'watching group'. This works particularly well with action or crime scenes with
Post a Comment
Read more