Don’t Convince Yourself Out Of Good Trades – Trust Your Gut

I know exactly what you’re going through as a trader, because I was exactly like you and I’ve got thousands of members like you. You see a good trade setup but for some reason you don’t take it even though your ‘gut’ is telling you to, then you sit there watching as it moves aggressively in your favor without you on board.

Convincing yourself out of perfectly good trade setups and wishing you were in trades you didn’t take, are two things that can literally make you feel like you are going insane. The hindsight ‘syndrome’ is a huge problem for many traders; worrying about what “could have been” will keep you stuck on the trading mistake train and can truly behave like a disease in your mind.

Today, I’m going to help you understand why you’re making these trading mistakes and help you conquer them once and for all…

The hindsight ‘syndrome’

I know exactly what you go through on a regular basis as you trade, I’ve been trading personally for about 14 years and have mentored thousands of traders in my time. I know that some days you spend half the day just wishing you didn’t miss that good trade. Unfortunately, we don’t have time machines that we can use to go back and stay in that good trade that we bailed on way too early or jump on that setup that was ‘perfect’ but for some reason we still didn’t take.

The hindsight ‘syndrome’ is a huge problem for many traders and it can literally destroy your trading mindset, trading account and your life if you let it. The “hindsight syndrome” is basically just a state of mind wherein you are almost constantly feeling regret and frustration over missing good trading opportunities because you do not yet trust your own trading abilities enough.

Two things tend happen when you have this hindsight ‘syndrome’: One, you sit there and wish you had followed your gut and traded a good signal you saw and you just cannot believe you didn’t take the trade. Or two, you were about to enter a trade but decided against it at the last minute because you ‘saw something’ that changed your mind (you convinced yourself out of it). You didn’t trust your gut and then you regretted it. Nothing is worse in trading and in life than seeing something play out in your favor without you onboard because you didn’t trust your gut feeling about it.

You NEED to eliminate the hindsight syndrome if you want to be a consistently successful trader. Not having confidence in your trading ability can cause over-analysis and second-guessing, this can turn into a sort of addiction that causes you to constantly look backward and fret over what you did wrong, instead of looking forward and being positive.

Successful traders have losing trades too, but they do not get consumed with regret or worry about what “could have been”, because as long as they are trusting their gut and sticking to their trading plan, they know they have nothing to get upset about. In the long-run, their trading ability and more importantly, their confidence in this ability, brings them solid profits.

Stop trying to ‘confirm’ good trades

I know I am probably going to get some negative feedback for this as it’s somewhat ‘controversial’ in the popular trading world, but then again if you’ve been following my blog for some time you probably already know I’m no stranger to controversy in the trading industry and doing things against the ‘status quo’…

A HUGE mistake that you’re probably making on a regular basis is something you probably never even considered to be a ‘mistake’ before: ‘confirming’ your trades.

Quite simply, if you have to try and confirm an obvious trade setup, it’s probably not worth taking. Read that last sentence about 10 times before you go on.

The biggest way you convince yourself out of perfectly good trade setups is by trying to ‘confirm’ their legitimacy by looking at other variables. So, I’ve got a very simple solution for you today; if you want to eliminate A LOT of frustration, second-guessing, doubt, fear and even anger, then simply STOP trying to ‘confirm’ your trades. You are not ‘confirming’ them, trust me, all you’re really doing is convincing yourself out of them and setting yourself up to feel all the negative emotions and feelings I just mentioned.

I am talking about basically everything here. From economic news reports to CNBC to lower time frame charts, other currency pairs / markets, regular news, etc., you will find a near infinite amount of things to contradict a perfectly good trade setup if you really try to. You will always find a reason not to trade if you try to, don’t be one of those people that is always looking for evidence not to back your gut feel and original judgment etc.

At a certain point, you need to just ignore all outside variables and really get ‘intimate’ with your trading strategy and stick to it, if you don’t do that you’ll never know if you’ve really got what it takes to trade successfully or not, because you’ll constantly be in a state of doubt, confusion and frustration as a result of looking at too many variables outside of your trading method.

Probably the most prevalent causes of ‘convincing’ yourself out of a good trade is looking at a lower time frame or another market to try and ‘confirm’ a signal you’re thinking about taking. If you see a good setup in a market, trade the market and the setup independently of other variables, don’t convince yourself out of a good trade by analyzing other variables, it just makes no sense! Now, this is assuming the setup you’re considering is a GOOD one, which depends on your trading skill and ability to find high-probability trade setups. But, if you have a good setup in your radar, it just makes no sense to find reasons not to trade it. Master an effective trading strategy like price action, build a solid trading plan around it, then scan the market each day for trades, and STOP over-complicating it!

Less work and stress, more profit potential

Finally, the biggest point to take away from today’s lesson is that you are wasting your time, money and mental sanity by trying to ‘confirm’ trade setups and also by worrying about what “could have been”.

None of the variables that you’re probably looking at right now to ‘confirm’ your trades matter, and you don’t even have to take my word for it. All you need to do is follow a couple so called ‘important’ economic news reports and see how they affect the market. If you follow a few of them you’ll eventually see what the analysts ‘predict’ ‘might’ happen as a result of the news is often the complete opposite of what the price action shows. Thus, the price action of ANY MARKET is all you really need to worry about. I promise, you will arrive at this same conclusion eventually all by yourself, but I am here trying to save you from losing money by telling you this now so you don’t have to be the ‘guinea pig’.

Another important point to remember; don’t let regret consume you. Understand that even if you master an effective trading method and follow it with strict discipline, you will still miss out on some good trades, you’ll still have losses sometimes and you’ll still exit too early sometimes, it’s just part of the game. But, if you are sticking to what you know and following your plan, there is NO reason to feel regret or let the ‘hindsight syndrome’ infect your mindset. Successful traders already know this, and it’s why they don’t get emotional and feel the frustration that you are feeling. You can join them if you want it bad enough. The path is not complicated, unless you make it so.

Imagine you are trying to become a price action trading ‘specialist’, you would not be trying to ‘confirm’ your price action trades by looking at variables other than price action, it just makes no sense. Begin by learning and mastering an effective trading strategy like the price action strategies I teach in my trading education courses, and focus PURELY on that, ignore all other variables and temptations.