Why is trading so hard!!!
Buy low and sell high. What’s so hard about it?
The root cause of why trading is so hard is mainly due to a rarely talked about or known aspect of trading, the amygdala hijacking.
Trading and money are like survival, it affects a part of our brain called the amygdala or the reptilian brain.
It’s an evolutionary knee-jerk reaction that triggers pain or pleasure, fear or hope. So if one wins a trade, there’s great euphoria, followed by fantasies of riches, if one loses, there’s great pain, regret and frustration, usually followed by anger and revenge (trading).
At a cognitive level, you can say do this or do that while standing on the sidelines looking in, like yelling at the players while watching a game. However, when one is IN the game, that objective perspective is replaced by a very deep and total sense of survival, there’s little to no subjectivity.
That’s why it’s hard to see the market clearly when one has something at stake in it. You’re only focused on how close or far the market is from your entry point.
So, to be good at trading, one must have high self-awareness and emotional intelligence more than anything else. It is a misconception that most people believe that they have to be good at math to trade. That is simply not true. Trading is primarily pattern recognition, which is very easy to understand, but 90% of trading is the ability to deal with your emotions when they arise. Please note, I am not saying to get rid of or ignore your emotions.
