Hope feels productive. It keeps you engaged. It whispers that staying in the trade is persistence, not stubbornness. But under the hood, something else is happening: your brain is trying to regulate emotional pain by imagining a future that erases the present.
THE SOUND EXECUTION SYSTEM (SES)
When pressure mounts, your nervous system shifts from process-oriented execution to outcome-desperate survival. That shift, tilt, produces STRAY trading (State-Triggered Reactions Against Yourself): revenge trades, FOMO entries, position sizing violations, premature exits.
The SES builds the psychological architecture to detect that shift before it hijacks your execution, regulates the state, and maintains values alignment (your why) even when urgency is present.
Neural Recognition: Can Intuition be Trained?
Intuition is not a mystical gift; it’s the nervous system’s ability to detect and synthesize patterns faster than conscious reasoning can track. In trading, it’s embodied pattern recognition under conditions of uncertainty. The problem is that most traders confuse it with impulse, emotion, or wishful thinking—and they pay for that confusion.
Testosterone, Risk, and Trader Brains
Short time frame trading is a mental endurance test. Traders face constant uncertainty, rapid decision-making, and the emotional highs and lows of wins and losses. Because testosterone is linked to confidence and risk-taking,
Sonder: The Missing Piece in Trading Psychology?
Sonder is the jarring recognition that every person you encounter, including the trader on the other side of your screen, your mentor, your chatroom rival,l has a life as vivid, layered, and chaotic as your own. Behind every breakout chase, every revenge trade, every hesitation at the entry button lies a nervous system shaped by decades of experience: childhood patterns, past wins and losses, family narratives about money and success, survival habits forged long before the markets ever mattered.
Is Your Money Mindset Sabotaging Trades?
Trading is a psychological battleground where every entry and exit is influenced by unconscious beliefs about money and control. If you’ve hesitated on textbook setups or chased losses into a blowout, your problem isn’t a lack of discipline; it’s likely tied to deep-rooted money narratives from your past. Many traders unknowingly repeat financial behaviors learned in environments where money was unpredictable or scarce. This “Scarcity Mindset” leads to over-controlling trades or panic-selling at the first sign of heat, as the nervous system treats a drawdown like an existential threat.
Greed Isn’t the Enemy: It’s an Underappreciated Edge
Greed, a familiar companion in trading, has often been cast as the villain. It’s been held responsible for impulsive decisions, account blowouts, and reckless overleveraging. But let’s face it, greed isn’t the problem—it’s how we navigate it that truly matters.
Much of trading psychology has been built on the idea of eliminating greed or controlling emotions. However, this outdated approach, often created by paraprofessionals without formal training in psychology, misunderstands how the mind works. Greed is not a switch you can turn off. It’s wired into your biology, linked to dopamine, ambition, and the pursuit of security. The goal isn’t to fight it—it’s to train it.
Change Your Life and Trading This Year
Key Points: Build a foundation for success by defining values in all key areas of life, from family to work, health, and creativity. Align actions with values to make disciplined trading and personal growth decisions. Use values as a compass to navigate challenges and...
Are You High Atop Mt. Stupid?
You’ve had a few solid weeks. You could have nailed some entries, sized up appropriately, and watched your P & L climb. Something clicks. You feel like you’ve finally cracked it. The market suddenly seems less chaotic, more readable. You’re confident in a way you haven’t been before.
This is the moment you’re most dangerous to yourself.
Trading Isn’t a Sport; It’s Commerce (And That Changes Everything)
Walk into any trading floor, scroll through finance Twitter, or crack open a trading psychology book from the last thirty years, and you’ll drown in sports metaphors. Winners and losers. Beating the market and coming out on top. The competitive framework feels intuitive after all, there’s money on the line, and someone’s taking the other side of your trade. But here’s what nobody tells you: the sports paradigm is actively working against your nervous system, triggering biological responses designed for physical competition while you’re sitting at a desk making probabilistic decisions in an environment that punishes aggression.
Emotions Drive All Decisions
Every decision we make is informed by emotions, whether we acknowledge it or not. Emotions act as guides, nudging us to pay attention to certain aspects of a situation. For example, excitement may drive us toward opportunities, while fear can warn us of potential risks. Research by Antonio Damasio demonstrates that individuals with impaired emotional processing struggle with decisions—not due to a lack of logic but because emotions are critical for prioritizing options.
Sean Sawyer, MS
Psychotherapist | Trader
Sean Sawyer has been a psychotherapist since 2003 and a full-time trader since 2018. Sean helps traders prevent tilt & repeat the same mistakes by rewiring the brain patterns that fail them under pressure.