By Dr. Mircea Dologa, MD, CTA, a commodity trading advisor of www.pitchforktrader.com*

I firmly believe that a trader’s consistency comes from fully comprehending market context. We cannot take action until we know exactly where we are now, what phase we are in and, especially, where we are going.

I couldn’t agree more with Charles H. Dow, when he said more than 100 years ago, “To know values is to comprehend the meaning of the movements of the market.”

By M. William Scheier, a futures trader and analyst in the E-mini Index contracts*
Posted: Jul 31, 2009

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 seventeenth (and last) 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.