Sports and trading often go hand in hand in terms of psychology. I'm a huge football fan, and I can't remember the last time I missed a Chicago Bears game. Last season the Bears almost made it all the way to the Superbowl, however all season long sports analysts were talking about how bad the Bears are and how unlikely it was for them to even make it into the playoffs.

The Bears brushed this off and were underdogs in virtually all of their games, yet they wrapped up the season with an 11-5 record. They went into games against undefeated teams with the same attitude that they went into games against teams who hadn't won a game all season.

There's a whole lot to learn about their psychology and mindset that can be applied to trading. If we go into a trade thinking we already know the outcome, chances are we almost always end up in a losing position. When we don't have our mind in the right places before and during the trade, then we almost always let our mind wander and end up losing focus on our trading strategy and thus end up in a losing trade.

Keeping your mind focused during the trading day isn't an easy task to say the least. While most traders that I work with know their trading strategy like the back of their hand, they often lose their grasp of their strategy during the trading day and let their mind wander. They forget the training they received and a panic sets in. As one loss occurs, the perception of this loss causes their mind to wander even more, leading to loss after loss after loss.

And the difficulty in training your mind to stay on track is ample--the more effort you put into making your mind focus on staying on track, the more likely it is to wander off course and thus the perception of a loss continues to become more negative and grow larger and larger.

There's actually an extremely simple solution to these problems. First and foremost you need to make sure you have a strategy that is time tested and actually works well. If you think the problem is with your actual strategy, then the Advanced Price Action Trading Course is a great place to start. If you think you have a good strategy but are struggling mentally, then step back from the markets and back up for a minute to practice your actual strategy. The best way to do this is to jump onto a demo account for a few weeks to see if you can make money in the markets when the psychology of trading is removed from the picture. If you are not able to make money on the demo, then again you need a more sound trading strategy. But if you are able to make money on the demo but not in the live markets, then there's a good chance your problems are psychological. More often than not this occurs because you are trading with money that you cannot afford to lose or because you aren't able to gain the proper focus required to become a successful trader.

If you find yourself in these situations, there isn't really a quick solution to these problems and they really require a case by case analysis of where the actual problem is. If you're in this situation drop me an email at the "contact us" link above and I'll gladly see what I can do to help.