As in your everyday life, you need to recover from disturbing events, in order to recover your judgment, and make reasonable choices - in trading all this is magnified.
It'd be interesting to compile a list for exactly how much time you need to recover from each specific event, in your daily life, and in your trading life.
Examples:
1) recover from a loss: 10 minutes
2) recover from a win: 5 minutes (this, too, makes you lose your balance)
3) recover from someone yelling at you: 10 minutes
4) recover from someone staring at you: 5 minutes
The advantage is that, whereas in real life some things need an immediate reaction (such as if you're in the street and someone starts yelling at you), in trading you have the luxury to take time off, all the time you need. But first you need to identify the effect of events on you, and their clouding your judgment.
Thanks to the chart game, I am assessing, with precision, the effect of these events (at no expense), and appraising the necessary time to take off in order to forget the emotions triggered by given thoughts or trading events (euphoria and sense of invincibility after a win, despair and discouragement after a loss - both emotions adversely affect your trading choices).
I might not be able to achieve imperturbability, no matter how hard I try, and I have been trying. It might improve, but my emotions may never disappear completely. On the other hand, I can definitely achieve this: understand how much time I need to get over a given event and subsequent emotion. Discretionary trading is also this: assessing, in your quest for profitability, how your mind works, in practical terms.
Cronometro online
A similar stopwatch / timer approach can be applied to... urges, which are also emotions, that go away after a given period of time. You feel the urge for an ice cream. Well, that, too, goes away if you wait. You don't really need to struggle to neutralize your urges. All your really need is to train yourself to wait. Wait before you talk, wait before you reply, wait before you trade.
A loss at the chart game will be forgotten after 10 minutes, effectively. The bigger the loss, the longer it will take. It is pointless to try to make it back, because your trading choices will be adversely affected by that desire.
A loss at the chart game will take, on average, 10 minutes to be effectively forgotten. A... let's say a 33% loss (or missed profit to a similar extent)... will take a few days to be forgotten. I would say that the ratio, the scale of realism of the chart game to real trading is, while being constant in all its aspects and emotions involved, about 1 to 100.
Everything requires a given amount of time.
I could pretend, at the chart game, that I am over a loss immediately, but that's not the way it is. For some reason my mind requires 10 minutes. I might go on for my entire life trying to make myself get over losses (in trading and in life) immediately, and it might never work. What is the point of banging your head against the wall over and over again, when there is such a simple alternative? That alternative is waiting.
So, that 10 minutes, make it even 20 minutes for when you tried your absolute best, required by the chart game loss to be digested becomes... in real trading... days. So it's not just 1 to 100, but rather 1 to 500. Yeah, because one day is made of about 100 15-minute periods, so if I require 5 days to forget in real trading what I require 15 minutes for the chart game, then that's a ratio of 1 to 500.
I might need to work on shortening that amount I wait, and I need to digest emotions and event triggering them. But the principle is correct.
As a trader, your approaching to your everyday life is to see as a useful test to measure your emotions. You should not view a blow to your ego as "how do I reply to this?" but as "let's see how many minutes it will take me to get over this". You should therefore walk around with a stopwatch and an entirely new attitude.
Among the many things that one could do, to make sure he's fully in control of himself, and not at the mercy of his emotions, a person, or rather, I, could try, or rather will try, or rather I will find useful to try to freeze for 5 seconds, exactly. That is enough to ask yourself if you're fully in control, and stop whatever else, outside of your control, and against your self-interest, you were doing. I think it is one excellent habit. For example, you could avoid or interrupt so many useless arguments. What is an argument, most of the time, if not you wasting time, at the mercy of your ego?
