The "Careless Stage" - How To Avoid?

Also called the "I don't give a f*ck moment", the careless stage is the most dangerous to enter in trading.

This stage is characterized by a moment when you lose total control of yourself and no longer care about what you're doing on the charts!

All you care about is making the money back or having a winning trade to reassure your sense of being right.

When you enter this stage, you no longer can think well. You are completely out of control.

You already have made so many mistakes that you no longer believe in your ability to perform well. That's not even the priority anymore.

You become blind to the market and self-centered: you want to fulfill your emotional needs no matter what.

But in reality, the market doesn't care about you!

The careless stage can only lead you to one end: a mental breakdown.

What can you do to avoid arriving at this stage?

Newton's First Law:

Every object will remain in uniform motion in a straight line unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force.

This is exactly how your bad trading pattern evolves.

Think about it:

Something triggers a subtle feeling of guilt. For instance, a small mistake you made. You don't even realize it but it got planted in your subconscious mind. Then, you take a trade outside of your strategy and you get more pissed. If you don't become aware of it (the friction) emotion starts to accumulate more and more as you keep trading. This feeling grows until it's too late and you find yourself revenge-trading. You lost it!

Our brain works on prediction...

We're constantly predicting what's going to happen next in the various scenarios of life: "Will I be safe or in danger after doing this?"; "Will I feel pleasure or pain?"

When you lose control, you become blind and lose the ability to predict the consequences of your actions.

You then lose the only power you own - the power to control your behavior.

Your emotions actually gave you so many signs and opportunities for you to stop. They were screaming at you! But, at the moment, you weren't armed with the awareness to stop yourself. You offered no friction and your problem pattern just kept on growing.

There's a clear path before you arrive at your limit.

It doesn't happen all of a sudden but in stages.

The first stages are of low danger and are easy to bring awareness to.

As you keep trading, it gets more and more difficult to become aware of your emotional state and to disrupt it, as a consequence. Your ego blinds your perception.

So if you want to avoid arriving at this stage, you need to know what particular stages happen before you arrive at your limit.

These stages are personal for each trader.

Start from the least dangerous and easiest to control till the most dangerous. Describe what happens in each one of them: emotions, thoughts, self-talk, actions, triggers...

Consider the example:

Stage 0 is the stage of control. You're calm and focused.

In stage 1, something triggered you on a small scale. The feeling is very subtle. It might've been a small mistake you made or yesterday's loss that you want to try to compensate for.

Stage 2 is activated when you have your first loss of the day. You start to feel a little bit angry but you're able to read the market still quite well.

In stage 3, you feel your anger growing. You can't take that loss out of your mind. This leads you to take a trade outside of your system. When you realize it, you feel guilt and the need to make the money back.

Stage 4 is triggered when you missed a trade that would've been a win. You wanted to enter the trade but the fear of the loss didn't let you pull the trigger. Now you feel out of control! You not only had a loss you shouldn't but you "skipped" the opportunity to make money today. In stage 5 you become blind, trying to recuperate all the mistakes and money you left on the table. This leads you to oversize your next trades which makes you lose a lot more money for the day than you should. You break all the rules of your strategy and more. At this point you're blind.

...

These are only examples. The way your problem evolves and intensifies is personal.

It's an introspective work.

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer"

If you want to solve your mistakes in trading, you need to get to know your enemy - your problem pattern - very well.

The whole aim of this exercise is:

1. To raise awareness around how and in what conditions your problem evolves and,

2. To prevent you to arrive at the careless stage

Have these stages with you while trading and set alarms to identify where you stand from time to time.

If you find yourself tempted to revenge trade, for example, stop and interrupt the evolution through the following stages.

Understanding how you should deal with this temptation is crucial! I'll give a Live Class on revenge trading for the E-Book community very soon.

Develop plans of action to come back to balance again. Re-establish your mental edge and start fresh again. The earlier you identify it, the easier it is to come back to stage zero.

The more you practice this exercise in real-time, the more you'll train your awareness and your ability to interrupt the pattern when it's still easy to handle.

Now you ask: "What if I am in the careless stage? What should I do to stop it?"

This is the million-dollar question...

How do you return to stage zero when you arrive at the Careless Stage?

The answer is: you don't.

If you can be aware that you are at this stage, all you have to do is try to save yourself from well... yourself.

That's right, you want to get out of the charts as fast as you can.

This isn't easy.

At this stage, you're blind to the risk you put yourself into.

You're not trading anymore, you're gambling!

So if you arrive at this stage, it means you made a bad job at recognizing the early signs.

You had a chance to stop but you didn't and now it's too late.

If you do the previous exercise well, you'll never arrive at the last stage. Or at least, it will be much more difficult!

Final Words

Recognize that before your problem takes big dimensions, there are signs that you can identify.

If you can outline the different stages of your problem pattern, then, you can identify them much easier.

My challenge for you is to start to collecting information about these stages in and after your trading sessions; Then, organize them from the lowest to the most dangerous.

Be aware of where you're standing in the ranking while you trade and you'll be much more prone to stop at the right time.

That's it, guys,

If this was helpful for you, leave a comment below

Sara

P.S.: I leave here the conversation I had with Tamir yesterday. Great topics approached! Give it a watch:

Whenever you’re ready, there are 3 ways I can help you:

1- Learn my trading system and proven edge here

2- Learn the method to stop repeating the same trading mistakes here

3- Build your Mental Edge and achieve peak performance with 1:1 coaching here

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