What is Trading Composure and Who is Yvan Byeajee?
Trading Composure is a trading psychology website run by Yvan Byeajee. His captivating blog, educational courses, and various other content helps traders reengineer their mindset with a focus on mindfulness meditation as the primary catalyst for change. While most other trading coaches give vague advice like “buy low and sell high”, “keep your losses small and let your winners run”, and other common axioms, Yvan actually provides practical solutions for cultivating an effective trader mindset. As great as these sayings sound in theory, how many traders truly have the propensity to follow them with consistency on a trade-by-trade basis?
The bitter truth is that not many traders have the mental framework in place to operate effectively within the market environment, which explains why over 90% of traders fail. But the good news is that our mental aptitude for operating effectively within the market isn’t fixed. It can certainly be developed over time. And Yvan himself is a perfect example of that. At the beginning of his trading journey, his mindset was a complete mess and it reflected in his results. Over the course of several years, he nearly blew up his entire $100,000 account. Feeling emotionally and financially devastated, he decided to go on 2-month long meditation retreat to explore the nature of his suffering. Upon his return, he gave trading another shot, and his experience was immensely different from before. He was now more self-aware, composed, and in control of his thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. What once was a painful and afflictive endeavor turned into a fluid and enjoyable one. Most importantly, he was able to establish consistency in both his process and profits.
What Courses Does Trading Composure Offer? Check Out the Trading Composure Pack:
Yvan has created multiple courses at Trading Composure to help traders instill a top-level mindset. The 3 home-study courses available are The Psychology of Risk (Free), The Trading Psychology Mastery Course (#1 Recommendation), and Trading For a Living.
The Psychology of Risk |View Course Content|
Most traders set out on their trading journeys with misguided perspectives on risk. They search far and wide for “foolproof” systems that only produce winning trades, but those systems simply don’t exist. There’s too much uncertainty in the market for guaranteed profits to ever be expected on a trade-by-trade basis. But that doesn’t mean we can’t embrace risk and still make money in the long run.
It’s not about eliminating risk completely which would be impossible. It’s about learning to take good risks. In other words, opportunities with low-risk and high-reward. Executing systems that put the odds in our favor can generate consistent profits over time despite losses along the way. Losses are unavoidable realities that just need to be controlled with risk management measures in place. Overall, the proper implementation of risk management in our trading operations insures our survival through the inevitable short-term hiccups along the way. There’s no sense in being emotionally hurt from the unfavorable outcome of an individual trade that is completely out of our control. It’s easy to embrace risk when we’re playing the long game with a positive expectancy system.
The Trading Psychology Mastery Course |View Course Content|
This course is broken down into two main sections containing mindfulness training and probabilistic thinking, with supporting guided meditations and live trading challenges. Ideally, this program is for new traders looking for a place to begin their trading journey on the right foot – to build the proper foundation for consistent profitability. But unfortunately, most traders in the course have already learned the “hard” way from the market that a mindset shift isn’t optional – it’s required. Through their own emotionally and financially agonizing experiences, they’ve come to the realization that real changes need to be made in regard to their thoughts, perspectives, and behaviors.
The reality is that there are no “natural-born” traders. Every single trader who has found consistent success in the market has developed particular mental skills in order to be effective within the market environment. We can’t take our skills from everyday life and expect them to be effective within an environment that exhibits unique characteristics. But this is exactly what most traders try to do, and the end result is dissonance and pain. The good news is that this mastery course provides practical tools that can be applied in order to correct our trading identities. Instead of being impulsive, inconsistent, irrational and losing traders, we can follow Yvan’s roadmap to become balanced, consistent, rational, and profitable traders.
Trading For a Living |View Course Content|
This course covers how Yvan has been able to make trading a realistic pursuit that he’s been earning a living from since 2006. He details every aspect of his approach – the actual trading component, the business side, and the traveling he’s been able to do thanks to the lifestyle he’s designed for himself. He even shares one of his actual day trading systems called The Rainmaker with a 70% win rate. Within the trading education arena, which is typically full of secrets and lies, Yvan provides honesty and integrity in all of his work (blog posts, books, courses, etc.).
His genuine openness about the “business” side of his trading is a breath of fresh air within the space. He’s extremely honest about why he chose to start a trading blog, write books, and create courses in the first place. It’s not only because trading can be a rather self-centered and lonely endeavor, so he’s been able to connect with other traders and help them through his website, but he also offers books and courses in order to smooth the revenue curve from his trading operations. The truth is that trading doesn’t necessarily produce a precise daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly income like a typical salaried job would. So he’s been able to take all the pressure off his trading by producing a reliable income from other sources as well.
Discover a Secret Universe That the Majority of Traders Don’t Perceive:
There’s no doubt that the majority of traders take the path of least resistance in their personal development. They generally jump into the market unprepared, without an accurate idea of what it takes the be a good trader. Consequently, they fall into patterns of monkey-see, monkey-do. They subscribe to newsletters and follow message boards so that they can hop on the bandwagon of “hot stocks”, look for a “guru” so that they can blindly mirror real-time alerts, and pursue all kinds of other methods that seem to be shortcuts to success. But there’s no cheating cause-and-effect. This superficial approach to achieving trading success never works in the long run.
If traders choose to dig below the surface-level, copy-cat approach, however, they’ll find a secret universe that the majority of the market doesn’t perceive. A heightened level of personal insight and consciousness. A path that frees them from the seemingly chaotic and mysterious nature of the market. They come to realize that it’s their own actions that have been chaotic and mysterious, providing them with random results. Fortunately, their expanded awareness allows them to calibrate their attitudes and perspectives to the highest level of effectiveness within this unique environment. They now understand that consistency is an inside job. No matter what the market does, they have control over their reactions to it. This depth allows them to be psychologically superior to the masses.
Deep self-awareness and self-control is a rarity, so success in the market is yours if you develop the proper mindset.
Learn More in the Trading Success Framework Course
Written by Matt Thomas (@MattThomasTP)
Related Pages:
- Trading Composure Review – Learn the Importance of Mindfulness in Trading
- What is the Trading Psychology Mastery Course?
- Combine Mindfulness Meditation and Stock Trading For Consistent Results
- What is Trading Mindset? The Central Component For Consistent Profits
- Rewire Your Brain For Successful Trading With the Help of Neuroplasticity
Wow, this is fascinating stuff. I do believe that mindset is extremely important to finding success in any field, and trading is no different. I feel like even the best of us have room for improvement in this area and can benefit from training and helpful reminders of how to stay in the best headspace.
Absolutely, Aly – I appreciate your comment!
Mindset/psychology is certainly important for achieving high-performance in any endeavor – I completely agree with that – but it’s especially critical when it comes to active trading. In many other endeavors, I think that people can “get away” or “get by” with the current mindset that they have (or close to it) in order to achieve an acceptable level of success. For example, before I quit my 9-5 job to work on this website and trade full-time, I had a terrible mindset in regard to that job. I wanted no part of it, yet I had a good salary. Having a better mindset would’ve made things better (at least from a psychological perspective), but I don’t think it impacted my earning potential in that particular area very much – if at all. Many people find themselves in a similar situation to this – where they dislike their job/career, but things sort of work out for them (at least from a financial perspective).
When operating as an active trader in the markets, however, there’s not nearly as much “wiggle room” when it comes to mindset/psychology if you actually want to achieve the long-term financial benefit. If you’re in it for excitement, thrills, or to essentially just gamble – then consistent, durable success will never happen. The proper mindset as a trader isn’t just nice to have (as it would’ve been in my personal job example above) – it’s absolutely required in order to make any money at all in the long-term. There’s no avoiding the massive paradigm shift that has to take place in order to become a successful trader – because many of the skills needed go against our natural human tendencies. One of the biggest shifts that need to be made is from thinking in predictions to thinking in probabilities. We crave certainty, but the market doesn’t provide it. So we have to adopt a probabilistic mindset (based on data/statistics) in order to take “smart bets” with positive expected value.
Overall, good traders learn to embrace risk, loss, and uncertainty instead of trying to ignore or avoid them. So it’s not just about being patient and calm, but there are specific attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs that need to be adopted in order to operate effectively within the market environment.
I’m very new to investing and trading seems too risky to me. I was also turned off by all the ads I’d see on youtube with these loud, smooth-talking salesmen trying to get me to buy into their program where I’d get “rich overnight.”
But I like the approach described here and perhaps I would consider getting into trading if I had this kind of training. It all seems so fast-paced and erratic. I had never thought about using mindset and meditation specifically for trading but it makes perfect sense. I already do yoga and mediation so why not learn something new that can hinge on that? Thanks for this article, I’m looking at trading in a new light…
Hi Nicole – thanks for sharing your thoughts! There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of deceptive “get-rich-quick” trading programs full of hype and false promises. Trust me – I’ve subscribed to some of them in the past (at the beginning of my trading journey). It’s unfortunate but people get sucked into them all the time looking for the “easy” route. But that “easy” route actually just makes their trading journey much longer and harder. I won’t say that every trading newsletter/program/advisory/service out there is bad because many of them do, in fact, offer quite a bit of educational content, but they have a tendency to mislead with their marketing. In addition to that, most subscribers of these services aren’t interested in building the skills necessary to become self-sufficient traders. They just want a shortcut. As a result, they focus heavily on trying to copy the trade alerts and ignore everything else. This is a fatal combination that produces large amounts of emotional and financial pain.
The good news is that there’s a completely different option that doesn’t involve being duped and having to learn the hard way. Most people don’t take this route, but it involves actually developing the skills to be a consistently profitable trader. Not just blindly mirroring some guru or expert hoping for explosive profits without putting any effort in. With the right structure in place in the form of the proper mindset and a system/trade plan/rules, trading can actually be smooth and enjoyable instead of painful and afflictive. If subscribing to one of these programs and focusing on “hot stock picks” and trade alerts was all it took to be a successful trader, then the success rate would be much higher. It takes the right mindset, methods, and experience in order to build good habits and refine your approach. People always say that trading and investing are risky, but it’s truly only as risky as you make it. You have complete control over that. You choose if/when to enter/exit every single trade/investment you make. No trade/investment ever needs to be made if the risk/reward isn’t ideal for you. For some reason, however, most people behave within the market as if they have no control – consistently acting impulsively, erratically, and irrationally – but it’s those particular actions that produce negative outcomes.
The foundation of trading success is undoubtedly in the mind – that’s where consistency and discipline has to come from. It doesn’t come from some external source like a guru, newsletter, the market itself, or sheer luck/chance.
I totally agree with you that most traders set out on their trading journeys with misguided perspectives on risk and they search for unexisting systems that only produce winning trades. Trading needs a very clear risk analysis plan because it is not a win-win case. The Trading Composure psychology of risk course is very educative, and thank you so much for sharing it with us. I will be sharing it with my colleagues too.
I am someone who is getting very intrigued by trading I want to learn more about it. I want to first start off by indulging myself with knowledge in the topic of trading psychology and I think I have done good by running into this website. I bookmarked Trading Composure for future reference and I appreciate the information you have provided
This is good information on trading composure and trading psychology. I fully agree with you that it is impossible to completely eliminate risk in the market, but one needs to learn to take good risks without fear. I can see how a course like The Trading Psychology Mastery Course can benefit traders. I will have a close look at the Psychology of Risk course to start with.
I love the information provided on this site. I appreciate the fact that you say that the majority of the failures in the market is due to the lack of mental framework and not directly due to education. I would add that the risk of choosing the wrong education is higher, especially if you have a mindset that needs adjustment.
You’re exactly right, Jo. Most traders not only jump into the market completely unprepared for the psychological implications of it, but they also tend to join various message boards, newsletters, chat rooms, and various other services. And what they’re usually looking for out of these services are “expert alerts”, “hot stock tips”, or “foolproof systems”. They’re basically looking for shortcuts to success – something that will help them “get-rich-quick”. Unfortunately, many of these programs are too good to be true and don’t live up to their marketing promises. In cases like this, not only are traders ill-prepared psychologically, but being led-astray tactically as well – and that’s the ultimate recipe for disaster.
The stock trading educational space can be a scary environment, there’s no doubt about it, and it pains me when naive and inexperienced traders go down this awful path. That’s why I hope to bring as much awareness to the psychological aspect of trading as possible, especially at the beginner of trader’s journeys. Many times, it takes years for traders to realize just how important mindset really is – it did for me. Fortunately, I finally recognized it, made high-quality changes to my approach, and now my operations are more smooth, rational, and profitable than ever.
Looking back, I made all the mistakes in the book – entering trades for no good reason, removing stop losses, doubling-down on losing positions, using huge position sizes, revenge trading, and the list goes on-and-on. It’s been such a relief to be able to overcome the emotional and financial agony that trading becomes for a lot of people. Overall, with awareness and application of the appropriate mental framework, I think traders would be much wiser and better able to avoid the sketchy services and scams out there that won’t really support them in their journey. I personally wish I came across some high-quality content regarding the psychological implications of trading before I even started, or at least early on in my journey, so that I could’ve avoided the “hard lessons”. But I’m grateful for them since they finally led me down the right path.
I agree with your review of Trading Composure wholeheartedly. I particularly like the concept about understanding that there will never be a risk-free trading moment, it is all about dealing with the emotions and working a game plan. I enjoyed reading about Yvan Byeajee and his journey to enlightenment, thank goodness he didn’t blow his whole $100,000 before he took a break to really think about what he was doing. I liked the first free course on risk and the other ones look interesting.