Trading is not an art, it is a psychological minefield, and the only way to get thru it is to make sure you have a very good metal detector, that not only detects metal, but also detects bullshit
When I get time I will dig out the pdf I have on the good take on MP, and send it on to @dontrader01, that is only if he want's it of course?
100% agreed that trading is a psychological minefield. Psychology is what? Is it physics, chemistry or biology? Neither. Psychology is an art. Life is fundamentally an art of psychology. Trading is business. And business is fundamentally an art of philosophy which is commonly known as business principle or business discipline. Business philosophy is powered by skills like psychology and creativity. And business is measured by analytical skill. Certainly this is a big picture about trading from an eagle's view point. That is why 99% of traders who fly low like a parrot wont see this big picture and struggle a lot. Only professional traders fly high like an eagle and understand trading better than rest of the world and succeed, because they put philosophy, psychology and creativity on top priority and analysis as secondary priority. Others give top priority to their analytical skills which leads them to struggle because analysis is a mismatched skill to be applied on trading which is basically an art of philosophy and psychology.
Hope this may help : http://www.briantracy.com/blog/general/understanding-your-subconscious-mind/ (These are based on results from world wide research by neuro-scientists.) And the answer is... "Your subconscious mind is subjective. It does not think or reason independently; it merely obeys the commands it receives from your conscious mind. Just as your conscious mind can be thought of as the gardener, planting seeds, your subconscious mind can be thought of as the garden, or fertile soil, in which the seeds germinate and grow. Your conscious mind commands and your subconscious mind obeys." Our subconscious mind is like a double edged sword. Very powerful and at the same time dangerous. When we program it with positive thinking it works positively for us. If there are some negative thoughts put inside it then it will work against us. The major challenge before the humanity is that most of the program is done between 5 to 12 age where there is not much life experience and maturity of thoughts. To "re-program " it based on our current level of experience we need to learn stuff like psychology, meditation, philosophy etc. Attending life transforming events like personal development workshops, therapies, life counseling, etc, are always good. Most of the traders take decisions either based on fear or greed which are actually pre-programed in the subconsciousness. It needs conviction not logic to overcome such gray seeds that are sowed deep inside our subconscious mind.
What is psychology ? As i said early in my post, psychology is a viewpoint, that has become a command once it registers in the subconscious mind. (https://www.elitetrader.com/et/thre...s-not-so-obvious.151802/page-566#post-4399639 When we embrace a viewpoint it eventually gets registered into subconsciousness and becomes our command or simply our psychology) A viewpoint is nothing more than a viewpoint, until it someway or other gets into the subconsciousness. Then it becomes an active command, or simply psychology, based on which we will be taking our decisions. Psychology is not a computer program. We are not robots either. Psychology is an art. Life is an art of philosophy, which is highest form of psychology. Those who treat psychology as science will lead life like analytical robots. I have seen one psychologist who treats psychology as a science and behaves like an imperfect robot.