By Anthony Trongone, Ph.D., CFP, CTA*

Practical advice often has us heading in opposite directions. For instance, does "absence make the heart grow fonder" make sense or is it "out of sight out of mind"?

Conflicting advice also commonly appears in investing. My favorite contradiction is the one we face when we are in a profitable position: Should we "take our profits" or "let our profits run?" Any trader with experience knows that the correct answer to this question depends on the current trading environment.

Fortunately, with the advent of electronic day trading, we can submit conditional orders. These orders give us the opportunity to benefit from either strategy. After defining three conditional orders that contain aspects of these special characteristics, I will discuss how we can apply this knowledge at the beginning of the trading day.

By M. William Scheier, a futures trader and analyst in the E-mini Index contracts*
Posted: May 30, 2008

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

The first installment in this series, the Prologue, published last month, was an introduction to examining the internal decision environment the trader faces within his or her 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 Account and the Analyst.