By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Trading while tired is usually treated as a minor inefficiency — slower reactions, a missed level, a sloppy order. The more expensive effect is harder to notice from the inside. Fatigue changes which outcomes feel likely, and it shortens the interval between a market event…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Trading decisions under market stress are not weaker versions of ordinary decisions. They are produced by a different process — faster, more habitual, less sensitive to what the screen is actually showing — and the written plan can be sitting a few inches away and…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Being profitable on demo but not live is usually read as proof of something unflattering: that the strategy only works when nothing is at stake, or that the trader is the weak point in an otherwise sound method. The first reading is occasionally true. The…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer Mindfulness-based trading presence is usually sold as calm, and calm is the wrong target. A trader who is calm when the position is moving against them is not regulated; they are either numb or not yet paying attention. What presence actually changes is narrower than…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Most lists of meditation apps for traders are lists of meditation apps with the word “traders” added. The ranking underneath is the one written for sleep, stress or productivity, and it answers a different question. A trading session makes three specific demands of…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer How to follow your trading plan is a question usually asked by someone who read their plan that morning. That detail is the whole problem, and it is the one the standard answer cannot accommodate. The information was present. The rules were legible. You could…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Ventral vagal trading is difficult to write about usefully, because the regulated state is defined mostly by the absence of things. No urgency. No narrowing. No sense that the outcome must be settled today. Described that way it sounds like a mood, and…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Dorsal shutdown trading is the only nervous system state that gets mistaken for good trading, which is why it does so much damage before anyone examines it. A trader in a mobilised state is visibly agitated — fast entries, oversized positions, obvious to…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioral Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Somatic markers trading advice divides neatly into two camps, and both have misread the same body of work. One camp says trust your gut, on the grounds that the body knows before the mind does. The other says never trust your gut, on…
By Sofia Harchich | Trading Psychologist & Behavioural Finance Writer | thewealthmirror.com Emotional stages of trading appear in almost every course on the subject, usually as a numbered sequence with a diagram, and almost never with a source. Five stages, seven stages, a curve running from optimism through euphoria to despondency and back. The models…
