By M. William Scheier, a futures trader and analyst in the E-mini Index contracts*
Posted: November 7, 2008

No matter how clever your trade entries are, successful trading is mostly a mental game. This treatise on trade psychology is appearing in a series of installments (and modified for use on this site) and has been excerpted from chapters of the book Pivots, Patterns and Self Recognition. The excerpts appear here by permission of the publisher, valhallafutures.com.

This is the seventh installment in this series, whose purpose is to examine the internal decision environment the trader faces within his mind. On the assumption that a better understanding of the mental conflicts we face will improve our trading results, the three modes of conflict are personified in separate "voices" inside of us. These are the Trader, the Accountant and the Analyst.

Opening prices are not a significant factor in many technical indicators and systems. Some analysts believe, however, that the open contains a key piece of market intelligence. For anyone using candlestick charts, for example, the open is the essential factor in forming the “body” of a period’s price movement.