Noise Killing Your Trading?

Interruptions are the enemy of productivity. A recent study from the University of California at Irvine found it takes around 23 minutes for most workers to regain their full concentration after an interruption. That's 23 whole minutes!

Psychological studies have shown that when you’re under high stress, you get dumber. It becomes difficult to remember what you had planned to do, especially when you’re under pressure to act.

That’s probably why so many people strike trouble if they don’t have a written trading plan.

It’s also why, faced with a catastrophe such as a wildfire, so many people don’t think to contact emergency services. And it helps to explain why 11 per cent of skydiving fatalities are due to parachutists failing to use the emergency chute.

This is a figure to remember: 75 per cent of people suffer cognitive paralysis leading to complete inaction when under stress. 

You have to train for emergencies. Pre-plan. Consider how you’ll need to react to a series of losses or one big loss in the markets. The purpose of training is to create procedural memory to guide your actions when your thinking shuts down. It allows you to activate the script.

Read your trading plan. Follow it. You wrote your plan when you were calm and thinking clearly. Trust that version of yourself, not this under-pressure, out-of-breath, twitchy version of yourself.