Trading Psychology Courses: From Start to Success

Most of us as traders look for the big breakthrough in trading that will give us immediate confidence and consistent profits. We look for new gurus, strategies, indicators and markets to get us to our goals as fast as possible. We tend to select the trading psychology courses that promise the easiest path to outstanding returns.

I have built a trading firm and coached and trained traders for nearly two decades and I have to say, that isn’t how it works.

Traders do become successful. Traders do make consistent profits. Traders do learn the joy of trading

And here is how it DOES work. Not with a bang, but drip at a time. Drip....drip...drip. Yes a drip at a time. Real progress that sticks, that adds to new behaviors that add up to consistent profits takes both time invested and calendar time with intention and coaching.

For example, I have just completed a three month trading psychology course “boot camp” with 17 traders and I want you to see the raw results as they evaluated their own performance on a week by week basis. If you were to compare all their progress charts, you would see how becoming a consistently profitable trader takes time and is lumpy.

The reason marketing hype sells training courses more than stating how progress is really made is because it appeals to the dreams we have about being successful. And we so want these dreams to become real.

However, “real” means reality. And here is the reality in a graphic visual. This is how REAL traders progress to REAL goals that support long terms consistent profits. It isn’t pretty. My marketing advisor told me not to share the results. But this is real! And if we aren’t real, how can we progress?

I asked each member of the course to list their most pressing problems that keep them from consistent profits. Then to write the state of mind that they would prefer to have. Then to make the first cell red. Each week I asked them to rate the issue as red (major problem), yellow (minor problem) or green (no problem). Some students got creative and added orange.

Keep in mind, that these traders had been experiencing these issues for most of their trading careers. A move from Red to Yellow is significant in terms of profitability. A few traders showed little progress. In fact in working with one trader, he decided his temperament was not suited for trading. This was huge progress for him. Other traders experienced significant progress. This also is reality.

We change what we measure. The more open and honest we are, the more community support we have, the more we accept ourselves and all our quirks, the easier it is to change the squares from red to green.

The well designed trading psychology course will incorporate these processes along with an understanding of how the brain works and how we progress and make changes that feel better, honor our values and get us to our goal of consistent profits.

The Best Model for a Trading Mentor

It turns out that we now understand from the advances in neuroscience that the most effective learning comes with effort. That’s right, effort. If we work at learning a new skill, the fumbling
around no matter how awkward it feels, provides a better platform for long­ term skill development then if we are just shown what to do.

It is also fairly obvious that if we try to adopt someone else’s map and model of the world in order to imitate their success, that the adoption of those new behaviors is quite difficult.

So what does this mean in terms of creating the best relationship with a trading mentor?

The best function of a mentor is to set it up so that the client can safely and confidently create new experiences for themselves that feel better in the moment, support their values and get them to their goals.

By set it up I don’t mean that the trading mentor will design the path. What I mean is that the mentor will provide a higher level of self­ awareness so that the trader will be able to see, feel  and experience each choice clearly. This higher level of awareness will allow the client to get clear feedback on the impact of their choices and make better and more intentional choices faster and faster.

This means that a trading mentor has the most difficult job of knowing the best behaviors but also allowing the independent trader to discover the answers for themselves. Working through the problems and creating the new behaviors one step at a time with continual clear feedback creates a repeatable pattern of more profitable trading behaviors.

This process can feel frustrating to the client because we all want easy answers. But these easy answers do not provide the process of creating new neural circuits in our brain that are the foundations of new intentional behaviors that serve us better. Without these new neural connections we tend to lapse persistent trading errors.

As a result many of us will select to trading mentors that provide the answer to our dreams rather than giving us a chance to do the hard work of working on the problem in a way that is solvable and sustainable.

As parents, teachers, friends and spouses we can also use the same model for those we care about. Especially as men we have a tendency to want to “fix things.” Can we be not just trading mentors but life mentors for those we care about? Can we set it up so that those around us feel our support and at the same time be allowed the frustration of finding their own path and creating the new neural connections necessary for sustainable behavior?

This is not an easy problem to solve. However it is more important to solve the right hard problem than the wrong hard problem.