Too Tired To Trade, trading as learning to fly.

Its not at all obvious that active trading can wear you out, but it does. It requires vigilance, at least when you're in the early learning stages. This vigilance takes mental effort, you are building new muscles in your mind, and that's hard work. A lot of it is getting more automatic, but as I am in these early learning stages its all news and I'm having to make myself remember all of it.

At a previous job I had my boss was learning to fly an airplane and owned a plane with a group of people. One day he invited me to go on a flying lesson with him. He was in the main chair and the instructor was in the chair next to him.

During the lesson the instructor kept barking at him to watch different instruments because their values would fall out of range. There was a dashboard of something like 6 or more different instruments that displayed all the different values you need. Each instrument had a range of values that were appropriate for what you were doing right then, and if the plane got out of the correct range you had to make an adjustment of some sort to the plane, tilt or speed up or slow down or whatever.

What I learned, and this has always stayed with me, was that the discipline of flying involved cycling through each instrument, noting its values, and making the appropriate adjustment. You had to learn to do this so it was automatic. The natural tendancy isn't to cycle like that, its to flit, but you had to just go through each one in turn and methodically record where it was.

Trading is like that. There are a few things that you have to observe when a trade is active, such as where you are with respect to the stop and where the market is and what the action is telling you. Experience and education prepare you, but the act of trading involves asking yourself over and over where things are with respect to some guideline and whether or not that requires a decision. This act of cycling through reminds me of my boss and his experience learning to fly. Its hard work at first, the mind doesn't like to shift around like that, it wants to find a place and rest. It isn't like you can't get up from the chair and get a drink, but you really don't want to wander when you've got trades on.

As a result, I get tired from paying so much attention. I'm exercising and developing mental muscles that I've never used, and they get sore. There was a nice trade opportunity at the end of the day today that I would love to have put on, the setup was very nice and, in fact, it would have worked. I was just done, though. I had a small loss today and didn't want to take any more risk and didn't want to have trades on that I was paying attention to. I was tired. Too tired to trade. If you aren't able to give the trade your attention you are asking to lose money because you will have no tolerance for a loss. That tolerance for a temporary loss (without being stopped out) comes from patience, and no patience means an early exit just to get out and be done with it.

Oddly, or not, this phenomenon doesn't happen for swing trading, where I almost always have some positions on. I'm checking them, to be sure, but I'm not right on top of each tick. Those trades last for days and can last for weeks, so checking them once a day to see if they've gone south is fine.