Tracy was still angry with her husband even though the argument happened last night. She thought that since she “slept on it” that things would look a little differently today…they didn’t. She and Bob had a good relationship, but sometimes “he could be so stubborn,” she thought to herself. In fact, her anger had caused her to forgo a very important part of her pre-market preparation. She traded the YM E-mini and her daily routine included identifying yesterday’s high, low, open and close with pivot points as well. She normally would check the overnight high and low on the Globex and establish significant demand and supply levels along with the pivots. Additionally, she would involve a number of other indicators before identifying whether or not there were high probability set-ups stemming from her Macro Trade Plan. But, today, she was very annoyed, frustrated and stressed. When faced with a potential set-up that she would normally double check, she barreled ahead, almost haphazardly scribbling down her trade plan and entering the trade. She was engrossed in her thoughts regarding Bob and did not realize that what she “saw” as a set-up was in fact a fake-out. She had entered to go long at what appeared to be a significant demand level when in fact if she had checked her time frames closely she would have noticed that there was a larger time frame price pattern that held a strong indication of a further drop in price. To make matters worse, she violated her rule as well and moved her stop thinking that the price action was going to reverse. It did not reverse and she took a significant loss. Tracy looked at the charts with contempt, her eyes boiled with anger as she placed another trade and another making several additional rule violations and ended her trading day with a stack of losses. She had begun her trading session out of alignment. She was extremely distracted by her emotions which caused her to distort what the charts were showing and to execute against what later she realized was better judgment. Tracy had let other “parts” of herself that were out of alignment make important decisions. She had allowed her “rep” to trade her account.
We all have “reps” or “parts” of ourselves that are tied into ego functions of self-promotion (the pretentious self puffery that is self-absorbed and out of touch with reality) and self-protection (the fear based thoughts, which limit the expression of our highest and best self). Your “rep” is never wrong, has no blemishes, makes no mistakes, is always cool and is out… Continue Reading
