By M. William Scheier, a futures trader and analyst in the E-mini Index contracts*
Posted: Jul 24, 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 sixteenth 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.

Chapter Fifteen
The Trader -- Give Him Voice

Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony.". Heraclitus

If the Accountant is rock as the Analyst is light, then the Trader must be water. In the changing weather of any given trading day, he finds himself immersed alternately in opposing emotional states not of his own making or design, and certainly not of his chosen intent.

Through awareness, resistance, discipline and determination, the Trader must needs navigate a course through seriously opposing internal currents, toward the goal. It is a purposeful thing, as contradictory and unnatural at times as learning the ideal golf swing -- is this force of one’s naturally opposing emotions and needs.

As the Accountant seeks a history in numbers, the Analyst seeks the glory of renewed life. And, the Trader -- embracing faith -- makes testament of his own survival, coursing the challenge of his destiny through all its inevitable failures and triumphs.

*Reprinted (and modified) with permission from M. William Scheier and the publisher, valhallafutures.com