What is Trading Mindset

Our Natural-Programming Makes Us All Bad Traders at the Beginning: As humans, our brains are naturally wired in certain ways in order to protect us. When we encounter a physical threat (like a tiger running at us), for example, we go into fight-or-flight mode. Both our minds and bodies immediately prepare for survival. When we enter this state, adrenaline kicks into overdrive, our perceived options decrease (all we can do is fight, flight, or freeze),…

Values Are Your Priorities – Principles Are the Rules You Choose to Live By: Values and principles are essentially what you stand for. They’re the rules and priorities that you’ve generated in your mind – consciously or not – that guide every decision you make. So take some time to truly consider what you want yours to be. Most people who enter the markets try to hide behind guru alerts, newsletters, and all sorts of…

A Trade Log is Not the Same as a Mindset Journal – Numbers Aren’t Enough: When it comes to tracking trade data, most people only think about the figures and statistics – things like entry prices, exit prices, stop losses, profit targets, risk-reward ratios, percentage of winning/losing trades, gains, losses, etc. It’s all about the numbers. And while these numbers/analytics can be extremely helpful, they’re missing a core piece to the puzzle – what’s going…

We’re Hardwired to Think, Feel, and Act in Alignment With Our Identity: Becoming a consistently profitable trader requires that you become a new version of yourself – there’s no way around it. But due to your current conditioning/programming, change can be difficult. When patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting have gone unchanged and repeated for years, they’re not so easy to break – even when you desperately know that change would be beneficial. Creating a…

The Mirror Concept in Trading – There’s No Cheating Cause and Effect: The market is a mirror – meaning your overall experience within it reflects exactly who you are. Your individual results are a manifestation of your thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, values, attributes, and emotions – which all ultimately lead to your behaviors. This means that you can’t hide from yourself as a trader – there’s no cheating cause and effect. The market will undeniably expose every…

Develop a Mental Framework That Harmonizes With Market Characteristics: When it comes to trading, I reference “effective mindset/psychology” quite a bit. So I often get asked questions like: What do you mean by a paradigm shift? Can you explain in detail the mental framework required for long-lasting, sustainable trading success? These are incredible questions. But they can’t be comprehensively answered in a short sentence or two. There are certainly some major overarching components that we’ll cover in…

Why is Day Trading So Stressful? Because Your Approach is Overloaded With Fear: The simple answer to why day trading is so stressful is that there’s something about the activity that you fear. And when I say “something” – I actually mean many things. Because in reality, you probably have an abundance of fears. Rarely is it ever just one. The most common fear amongst traders is the fear of losing money – that’s a…

The Importance of Proper Expectation-Setting When You Get Started Trading: There’s no doubt that most traders get involved in the markets with the wrong expectations. They view trading as some sort of easy cash-grab or get-rich-quick opportunity – and essentially just use the markets as a platform to gamble (for thrills and excitement). But if you actually want to achieve a consistent and sustainable level of trading success, then random and impulsive trading isn’t going…

Best Trading Paradigm (@MattThomasTP) Tweets From February to December 2021: When I created the @MattThomasTP Twitter handle back in February – I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. But my main intention for the account was simple – to share the best possible insights into the topic of trading mindset/psychology that I could. I certainly don’t consider myself a guru on the subject – and there are plenty of traders and trading psychology coaches that…