Using Your Gut & Subconscious Mind to be a Successful Forex Trader

Practicing To Be the Best

A lot of traders start off into their trading and fall into the trap of trading anything and everything which we all know is of course called “over trading”. Whilst this is easy to spot, this is far harder to stop and the major problem with this is that every time you enter into a rubbish trade, you are feeding your subconscious mind with another setup to hold on to and remember for the future. 

The subconscious mind plays a massive role in the success of your everyday life and it has the same affect in trading. The subconscious mind is the part of the mind that we store the majority of our thoughts, feelings and habits. The reason habits are so hard to break is that they are formed through repetition and burnt into the subconscious and as we are about to discuss; whatever you feed the subconscious mind, it will continue to give it back, good or bad.

The subconscious mind can be a real blessing if you get it to work for you. This can be for life, work, trading or in whatever situation you choose. A lot of traders will first start on a demo account with play money. Because this is just pretend money, they go wild. They will trade anything and make as many trades as they can. With this type of lazy practice they are burning bad habits into their subconscious mind that later will become second nature in their trading.

 

Feeding Your Subconscious A+ Trades

When you are trading you must ensure your trades are always A+ (high probability). By trading A+ trades such as the ones we teach at Forex School Online over and over again you are feeding your subconscious mind the right type of habits. Your subconscious will not be able to do anything, but start finding A+ trades for you by the time you have finished because it will start working on the habits you have formed. Remember; your subconscious holds your habits and what you feed it, it will feed you back, so don’t go giving it rubbish. This goes from the words you use, to the trades you make.

The reason the way you practice your trading is so very important with every single trade and every single thing you do in your trading is because you want your good habits to become second nature and not your bad ones, or in other words you want to be able to trade and make great decisions every time without having to think about it and this is where your subconscious kicks in. If you have only been feeding your subconscious rubbish and feeding it bad habits, well guess what it is going to give you? Yep, you’re going to get bad habits right back.

To explain how this works, the best example is learning to drive a car. When we first learn to drive a car we have to really use our conscious minds to process all the thoughts that go with driving. We have to run through our minds how to change the gears and the breaks etc. After driving many times however and burning this into our subconscious with repetition of doing the right things, we can just get into the car and drive. We no longer have to consciously think about turning the gear stick and using the break. We can just do it on autopilot. This is because the subconscious has been fed and now has all the correct habits needed for us to drive that car successfully.

 

Trading From the Gut

When you are learning and going through your trading journey every time you are looking at a chart your subconscious is taking in more and more. Trading with the gut is all about trading with the subconscious mind. Every time you make a trade or you see a trade setup or you see something unfold on your charts your subconscious takes this in. Your conscious mind may have forgotten it long ago, so you may not consciously be able to remember it, but your subconscious will still be storing it. Because your subconscious stores all these memories it is able to give you feelings when it is required and this is where “trading from the gut” comes in. Because you can’t consciously remember the memory or the exact previous setup and how it worked out your subconscious can give you a “feeling”.

Traders will often make remarks such as “something just did not feel right about this trade” or “I don’t know why, the trade looked great, but something was telling me to pass on this one” and whilst they can’t put their finger on it, they just got a feeling. This feeling is their subconscious telling them something and giving them a feeling. Whilst they can’t consciously remember, their subconscious can and their subconscious can remember every setup, good and bad that worked and that didn’t.

The more experience and chart time a trader has the stronger their subconscious is going to be and the better they are going to get at learning to listen to their subconscious.

 

Making a Trading Plan & Start Journaling

The one thing all professional traders all have in common are they all have an in-depth trading plan. No matter what market they trade and method/system they may use to trade, all professional traders have a comprehensive trading plan that covers every rule of their trading method inside and out and is like their private trading rule book. If you don’t have a trading plan and are serious about your trading you really need start thinking about why you don’t have a plan.

A trading plan can start laying out rules that will;

• Make clear guidelines for what an A+ trade setup looks like
• Make clear rules for when not to trade (to stop over trading)

 

Your trading plan will keep you on track and is designed to help you only make the best trades (provided you stick to it). This way you can start feeding your subconscious only the best A+ trades and start building the best habits and eventually you will start making the best trades and the best decisions without even thinking about it. You can read more about how you can make your own trading plan and exactly what it should include here: Making a Forex Trading Plan

Trade Journaling is just as important as making your trading plan because if you don’t journal you have no idea about your results. Trade journaling is not just about your win/loss ratio and how much money you make. To get the most out or your journal you need to really put into it and include extra information. At the end of each month when you review your journal it is well worth the effort because you can find major areas for imrpovement and exactly where you need to spend more time concentrating on getting better and without a journal you would only be guessing. You can download a free journal as well as read about what your journal should include here: Forex School Online Journal

 

Recap

Habits are what help run our everyday life and also our trading.  If traders are not careful when they are trading especially when learning, they can build some bad habits that they will struggle to ever break. Traders often just think “Oh I will just practice like this and then just turn it on and trade for real when I move to a live account” and then quickly find out that nothing is changing for them. A lot of the reason is they have been practicing to fail. They have been on their demo account and trading willy nilly and not caring about losing and thinking there is some switch.

You must practice how you intend to trade because you are constantly forming habits. If you practice to lose, then this is what is going to happen. If you want to be successful, then start practicing being successful and don’t practice to lose.

I hope you have enjoyed this topic today and this article. If you have any questions or comments, just put them in the comments box below and I will get to them for you. If you want to learn anything more about trading psychology or the advanced price action setups we do not discuss in public; check out the Price Action Course which comes with a 3x course, members videos, members articles, members psychology section, members market summary, members live price action setups forum & email support.