BTW Trade Vic has a excellent section on psychology that examines a trader that goes through a similar problem http://www.amazon.com/Trader-Vic-Methods-Street-Master/dp/0471304972
Hey guys just wanted to thank all of you for some great ideas. I will like to add, that if you have problems letting your profits run, invert the chart.
in my opinion, the subconscious mind is your true self. Everything you are is in your subconscious mind. if you want to change that you have to face all your fears. To change the subconsious is to change you. It is very difficult but with time and a constant attention can be done. If you experienced troubles in your life then that is what you are comfortable with and anything outside of that makes you uncomfortable and your subconsious will try and take you back into that comfort zone. You must learn to break that cycle. Only by acknowleding this can you attempt to change. Good luck.
You need a method that is proven to work, and of course (since it won't always work) you need proper money management and this will solve all psychological issues. As far as I am concerned, I confused for about 10 years not knowing myself with not knowing the markets. I thought that somehow I was sabotaging myself, by not applying stoplosses and similar. I thought I had a subconscious desire to lose. The truth is that if you don't know what the ideal stoploss or takeprofit is, you will not be consistent in applying it. In other words you won't be using any method, because you don't know what method works. This will be because once you applied a stoploss, and then the market proved it was a mistake. The next time you didn't apply it and the market proved you wrong again. So how do we find out what method works, and apply such a method consistently? The answer for most of us cannot be through discretionary trading. We don't have rational enough minds when we're investing money on which depends our life. Also, you will never be able to remember what works and what doesn't work - you won't be able to compute statistics correctly in your mind. And so, without a clear idea of what works, your actions will be influenced by your emotions at the time, because once you are in the market you lose your rationality. So your trading will get even worse. It's not like playing a board game, where you lose nothing and you can still keep calm and rational (like when you're playing the strategy game "Risk"). Once you open your position, for most of us, your rationality is gone. So what you need to forget about discretionary trading altogether, and to go into automated trading. What you need is back-testing a system, finding what works, including money management, and then, once you are positive that it works, you will use it. Nobody wants to lose money. Maybe most of us don't have the energy to develop an automated trading system, and they would rather look for psychological reasons. It's more appealing to read about psychology, than to buy data, configure tradestation, solve all sorts of bugs... spend years building your automated trading system. Once again, if you don't know what works, no psychological work or self-control will help you make money. And if you know what works, you won't need any psychological work on yourself, because nobody will deliberately choose to lose money, by doing the opposite of what he knows to work.
What is weird is that our logical and seemingly conscious decisions are handled by our subconscious! I learned long ago to always sleep on a decision, it's a step in the right direction. Recently I did a guided imagery experiment and wow!! That's all I can say... I was able to just ask a question and was served up the best answer... I have an awful time getting a plan in place for anything because I'm entirely focused on the present... all of a sudden I was able to see the whole answer, sort of concurrent plan A and plan B and the diplomatic response necessary to others involved.. I mean it was like a vision quest and very fulfilling, took about three minutes of time... 65 years to get to something and 3 minutes to do it...
I was a first timer there, maybe I took IT a little by surprise... what if down the road IT decides to play some games with me, give me some bad answers... can I sue IT in some court... Only God's court... time will tell... Actually I think the imagery guides us right past the blockages in our thinking that are instilled by mean parents, siblings, trauma, etc... This guided imagery is the greatest really. I have been convinced that the true answers to nearly everything are astonishingly simple... every day I can look back and see what the market was telling me but I can't make the cognitive leap from seeing it after the fact to seeing it in realtime... that is my next quest...