5 Easy Ways to Conquering Trading Stress

To most traders, trading is their job - it’s not a hobby. It requires commitment and consistency. It’s not something you sign up for on the side while also having a full-time job. Most traders want to make it to the top where they’ll be making enough money to dedicate all of their time to trading. 

 Amidst all the trading jargon, it is often forgotten that stress is a natural reaction to all the things that traders juggle when it comes to profiting in the market. 

Stress labels include fear, paranoia, impatience, anger, and there is an opportunity for anyone who takes a proactive approach to these stressful triggers rather than reactively moving forward with them. 

In this article, we will help provide you with actionable steps and a better understanding of how stress can affect your ability to make good decisions when 

Trading is not easy and to be honest, it can definitely cause some financial stress. We want you to have fun in the markets – whether you’re a beginner or an advanced trader. 

In my long career as a trader, I have seen many people trade without stress but not a lot. Most traders are nervous and neurotic around trading times. This kind of mental energy can be exhausting and can cause long term health problems. 

Stress-Free Trading Tip Number 1: Have Clear Goals and Objectives: Trading Plan

The #1 Tip to trade without stress is to start with a trading plan. The best way to do this is to set clear goals and expectations. Analyze the market and plan what you want to accomplish by each deadline.

Imagine yourself reaching these goals and taking the next step once you accomplish your goals. This will get rid of the uncertainty feelings that lead to trading stress. 

A trading plan does not have to be a very big document. To begin with, you can start with a single page. Over time this page will turn into 2 then 5 and then in several dozens of pages. My trading plan now has about 52 Questions. In fact, all members of AIMS Community can see and copy my trading plan.  At the end of each year, I review my trading performance and based on that I come up with a new trading plan. I then share my entire trading plan with my members. 

Trading plan not only keeps me on track it also helps me remain focused and allows my mind to remain stress. Everything is laid out in my trading plan so I don't have to worry about what should I be doing. 

Stress-Free Trading Tip Number 2: Find out What Works for You?

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio

The second way to trade without stress is to find a trading strategy that works for you. Each trader should have a trading system that they can feel confident with. If you have the right strategy, you will always know what moves to make when the market begins to shift. 

I have several strategies at my disposal. Over the long 10 years of my trading career, I have managed to develop more than a dozen trading strategy. My personal favourite is The Setup One trading strategy. However, my most current trading strategy is what I call the LOBOT method. I simply adore the simplicity of this method. I use the LOBOT strategy on daily basis. Each morning we trade the DAX30 using the LOBOT method along with our friends in our Discord Server. 

In addition, you can decide whether you want to use technical or fundamental analysis. I have not come across many traders who would use Fundamental analysis lately. But it can be a powerful tool for those willing to hold positions longer terms. 

Technical analysis looks at price action and volume, while fundamental analysis primarily looks at company news and financial statements. Both methods are widely popular among traders because they 

Stress-Free Trading Tip Number 3: Choose the Right Niche

The third way to trade without stress is to find the right niche. You need to find a trading niche that fits your personality and skill level. For example, if you are only interested in making small trades, you should avoid high risk or low liquidity stocks. 

Instead, you should look into the safer options that offer a greater chance of success. Finding the right niche allows you to feel more comfortable with your investments, which will lead to a decline in stress. 

The way you trade should be flexible as no one size fits all. Your style should be personal and unique to you while giving you a high probability of success.

Stress-Free Trading Tip Number 4: Keep a Trading Journal

Photo by Judit Peter

The key is to understand our trading style works best for us. The path we are on in our trading journey is unique to us. What works for someone else may not work for us. And that's OK. All that matters is that you develop a trading style that allows you to trade your own way, your way!

Whilst, trading doesn’t have a “no stress” option, knowing how to trade correctly can really help you get started and improve your results. I highly recommend you join our trading community and begin trading stress-free. JOIN NOW 

Stress-Free Trading Tip Number 5: Acquire a Probabilistic Mindset 

The probabilistic mindset is the thought process many successful traders possess. It is the way a trader thinks about everything on a probability scale.

The best traders have a probabilistic mindset. They use probabilities to make decisions, and can quickly change strategies when their assumptions are wrong. A probabilistic mindset will help you make better decisions in Forex.

In a probabilistic mindset, everything has a degree of uncertainty. The strength of your belief is represented by the amount of evidence supporting it.

Whether you’re a novice trader, a day trader, a swing trader or an investor, the probabilistic mindset will help you to truly understand the market and become consistently profitable.

How to Stay Calm when you know you'll be Stressed? [Stress Free Trading]

“Brain releases cortisol that raises your heart rate, it modulates adrenaline levels and it clouds your thinking.”

And with all the cortisol in your brain your thinking will be cloudy and you won't even know about it because "your thinking is cloudy". :) 

“It's something that he had gotten from the psychologist Gary Klein, who had written about it a few years before, also called the pre-mortem. Now, you all know what the postmortem is. Whenever there's a disaster, a team of experts come in and they try to figure out what went wrong, right? Well, in the pre-mortem, Danny explained, you look ahead and you try to figure out all the things that could go wrong,and then you try to figure out what you can do to prevent those things from happening, or to minimize the damage.

said Daniel Levitin in his recent Sep 2015  TED talk, “How to stay calm when you know you’ll be stressed?”.

We become STUPID when we are stressed. Literally our brain stops sending blood to the parts of the brain that help us make "intelligent decisions". 

"Remember, our brain under stress releases cortisol, and one of the things that happens at that moment is a whole bunch on systems shut down. There's an evolutionary reason for this. Face-to-face with a predator, you don't need your digestive system, or your libido, or your immune system, because if you're body is expending metabolism on those things and you don't react quickly, you might become the lion's lunch, and then none of those things matter.

Unfortunately, one of the things that goes out the window during those times of stress is rational, logical thinking, as Danny Kahneman and his colleagues have shown. So we need to train ourselves to think ahead to these kinds of situations."





Proper Planning ahead of time will minimise the “negative effects” of stress. There are things we can do, systems we can put in place that will prevent or at least minimise the bad effects of situations in which we are stressed because stress can cause us to make mistakes. And we all know that mistakes in trading are always expensive. 

Planning can help prevent a bad thing to turn into a total catastrophe. Have you ever had a trading day where you wiped the entire account or the whole month's profits? Yes, it happens, and it has happened to me a few times until I realised that I must address this issue in my plan.

Our daily trading plan states that we will stop trading if we have three consecutive losses. This prevents us from going into the “negative zone”. It stops us from revenge trading and trying to win back the losses. We stop and come back with a fresh mind another day.

Having a proper trading plan may even help  decrease the stress levels because you’ve got the confidence that your plan has got everything covered. Often, stress is caused by the urgency of the situation and our inability to respond in a timely manner.

Uncertainty is the main cause of stress for traders but that can be cured by working on achieving a probabilistic mindset. If you think in probabilities you will be able to remind yourself that you do not need to know what’s going to happen next in order to make money in the markets.

Decision making can be stressful as well specially when you have less time to respond and even more difficult when you are confused and the more stressed you get the cloudier your thoughts. Making decisions that are not preplanned, that  you have not thought about in advance may become the cause of the “stress” itself at the “heat of the moment”.

e.g. You have been closing your trades too early and now you have finally decided to apply a method that will increase your chances of staying in the trades longer. You make a decision and from today you are determined to follow the green line as your exit. No more exiting the trades without a proper exit signal. You take a trade and it spikes 100 pips in your favour. You say, “wow  that’s awesome” and although on one side you’re excited on the other you are stressed about what to do with this bonus income.

Do I take the profit or do I still follow the green line? If I close here would I still get DS1 or would I have to score a 0 but at least I bank the profit. IF you’re on m5 or m1 chart you might not have that long to think and respond which may result in experiencing even more stress.

What do you do? Well, the simple answer is that if you don’t have a plan for a situation like this, and you just experienced it, the logical thing to do is that you will create a rule for a situation like this so that you can apply that rule in the future. If it happens the next time you know exactly what you’re going to do. This will bring more accuracy and less reasons for experiencing stress.


However, if you don’t keep a journal, do not have written well documented trading plan, then  chances are that you will experience the pain and stress and won’t do anything about it for years and years and continue wondering why you always feel the stress and don’t become consistently successful.

Have a Plan TODAY. Join AIMS to learn how to create a trading plan within a week. 

ps: A healthy level of stress may be good for peak performance as suggested by modern research. You may want to watch this TED talk about How to make stress your friend? 

9 Reason why everyone should have a Trading Plan

What is a Trading Plan? 

"A trading plan is a complete set of rules that covers every aspect of your trading life. Many experts refer to the need to have an ‘edge’ which will tip the balance of probabilities of success in your favour." Say Tim Wilcox who wrote and shared a simple but powerful trading plan template int he trade2win forum about 10 years ago.

Everyone Needs a Trading Plan. If you don't have one, anything you do is a mistake. 

A trading plan will make the act of trading simpler than it would be if you traded without one. It will limit your opportunity to make bad trades and it will prevent many psychological issues from taking root.

9 Reasons Why YOU should have a Trading Plan 

[How to be a consistently successful trader? Have a Plan]

1. Relaxed, stress free trading that is simpler with a plan than it is without one 
2. Ability to monitor your progress, diagnose faults and amend the plan accordingly 
3. A plan helps to prevent many psychological issues from taking root 
4. A plan that is adhered to strictly will reduce the number of bad trades 
5. A plan will help prevent irrational decisions in the heat of the moment 
6. A plan enables you to control the only thing you can control - yourself  
7. Professional traders are highly disciplined. A plan will instil a large measure of discipline into your trading. Gamblers tend to lack both discipline and a plan 
8. A plan will enable you to trade outside your comfort zone. How many times have you let a loss run and cut a profit short because it was the comfortable thing to do? A plan, executed with discipline, will help to prevent this from happening 
9. A plan is your roadmap which will enable you to get from wherever you are now to wherever you want to be – i.e. consistent profitability 

All credit goes to Tim Wilcox for sharing this knowledge and to Steve of www.for-exe.com for sharing the link/document with us. Tim has shared a Trading Plan Template that should help all traders at any stage of their trading to formulate a great trading plan.

The template (and, by implication, your plan) – is designed in such a way that if you do take a ‘wrong turn’ on your roadmap, you will know about it very quickly and have the opportunity to correct the problem before losses spiral out of control.

Thanks Tim!!!

Link to Trading Plan Template