Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

by Mark Douglas

A finite number of traders participate in the markets on any given day, week, or month. Many of these traders do the same kinds of things over and over in their attempt to make money. In other words, individuals develop behavior patterns, and a group of individuals, interacting with one another on a consistent basis, form collective behavior patterns. These behavior patterns are observable and quantifiable, and they repeat themselves with statistical reliability.

There’s a big difference between predicting that something will happen in the market (and thinking about all the money you could have made) and the reality of actually getting into and out of trades. I call this difference, and others like it, a “psychological gap” that can make trading one of the most difficult endeavors you could choose to undertake and certainly one of the most mysterious to master.

The winners have attained a mind-set—a unique set of attitudes—that allows them to remain disciplined, focused, and, above all, confident in spite of the adverse conditions. As a result, they are no longer susceptible to the common fears and trading errors that plague everyone else.

If you are unable to trade without the slightest bit of emotional discomfort (specifically, fear), then you have not learned how to accept the risks inherent in trading. This is a big problem, because to whatever degree you haven’t accepted the risk, is the same degree to which you will avoid the risk. Trying to avoid something that is unavoidable will have disastrous effects on your ability to trade successfully.

Admitting we are wrong and losing money to boot can be extremely painful, and certainly something to avoid. Yet as traders, we are confronted with these two possibilities virtually every moment we are in a trade.

This is called an objective perspective—one that is not skewed or distorted by what you are afraid is going to happen or not happen.

don’t think I could put the difference between the consistent winners and everyone else more simply than this: The best traders aren’t afraid. They aren’t afraid because they have developed attitudes that give them the greatest degree of mental flexibility to flow in and out of trades based on what the market is telling them about the possibilities from its perspective. At the same time, the best traders have developed attitudes that prevent them from getting reckless.

Ninety-five percent of the trading errors you are likely to make—causing the money to just evaporate before your eyes—will stem from your attitudes about being wrong, losing money, missing out, and leaving money on the table. What I call the four primary trading fears.

if you are afraid of being wrong or losing money, it means you will never learn enough to compensate for the negative effects these fears will have on your ability to be objective and your ability to act without hesitation. In other words, you won’t be confident in the face of constant uncertainty.

It will feel like you can’t trust the markets; but the reality is, you can’t trust yourself.

However, you won’t be able to achieve that trust until you have trained your mind to override your natural inclination to think in ways that are counterproductive to being a consistently successful trader.

I’d like you to ask yourself what one characteristic (a form of personal expression) is common to every child born on this planet, regardless of the location, culture, or social situation the child is born into. The answer is curiosity. Every child is curious. Every child is eager to learn. They can be described as little learning machines. Consider the nature of curiosity. At its most fundamental level, it is a force. More specifically, it is an inner-directed force, which means there’s no necessity to motivate a child to learn something. Left on their own, children will naturally explore their surroundings. What is more, this inner-directed force also seems to have its own agenda; in other words, even though all children are curious, not all children are naturally curious about the same things.

our needs and desires are generated in our mental environment, and they are fulfilled in the exterior environment . If these two environments are in correspondence with one another, we’re in a state of inner balance and we feel a sense of satisfaction or happiness. If these environments are not in correspondence, we experience dissatisfaction, anger, and frustration, or what is commonly referred to as emotional pain.

The universe in which we live has a natural tendency to not tolerate a vacuum and moves to fill it, whenever one exists. (The philosopher Spinoza observed centuries ago that, “Nature abhors a vacuum.”)

PROBLEM: The Unwillingness to Create Rules I have not yet encountered a person interested in trading who didn’t resist the notion of creating a set of rules. The resistance isn’t always overt. Quite the contrary, it’s usually very subtle. We agree on the one hand that rules make sense, but we really have no intention of doing whatever is being suggested. This resistance can be intense, and it has a logical source.

PROBLEM: Failure to Take Responsibility Trading can be characterized as a pure, unencumbered personal choice with an immediate outcome. Remember, nothing happens until we decide to start; it lasts as long as we want; and it doesn’t end until we decide to stop. All of these beginnings, middles, and endings are the result of our interpretation of the information available and how we choose to act on our interpretation.

PROBLEM: Addiction to Random Rewards

Several studies have been done on the psychological effects of random rewards on monkeys. For example, if you teach a monkey to do a task and consistently reward it every time the task is done, the monkey quickly learns to associate a specific outcome with the efforts. If you stop rewarding it for doing the task, within a very short period

of time the monkey will simply stop doing the task. It won’t waste its energy doing something that it has now l...

However, the monkey’s response to being cut off from the reward is very different if you start out on a purely random schedule, instead of a consistent one. When you stop offering the reward, there’s no way the monkey can know that it will never be rewarded again for doing that task. Every time it was rewarded in the past, the reward came as a surprise. As a result, from the monkey’s perspective, there’s no reason to quit doing the ta...

PROBLEM: External versus Internal Control

One of the principal reasons so many successful people have failed miserably at trading is that their success is partly attributable to their superior ability to manipulate and control the social environment, to respond to what they want. To some degree, all of us have learned or developed techniques to make the external environment conform to our mental (interior) environment. The problem is that none of these techniques work with the market. The market doesn’t respond to control and manipulation (unless you’re a very large trader).

When you acquire this mind-set, you, too, will be able to trade without fear. You will no longer be susceptible to the multitude of fear-based errors that come from rationalizing, subconsciously distorting information, hesitating, jumping the gun, or hoping. Once the fear is gone, there just won’t be a reason to make these errors and, as a result, they will virtually disappear from your trading. However, eliminating fear is only half the equation. The other half is the need to develop restraint.

For a trader, winning is extremely dangerous if you haven’t learned how to monitor and control yourself.

if you could choose one of the following two traders to manage your money, which one would you pick? The first trader uses a simple, possibly even mediocre trading technique, but possesses a mind-set that is not susceptible to subconsciously distorting market information, hesitating, rationalizing, hoping, or jumping the gun. The second trader is a phenomenal analyst, but is still operating out of the typical fears that make him susceptible to all of the psychological maladies that the other trader is free of. The right choice should be obvious. The first trader is going to achieve far better results with your money.

The novice trader experiences the feeling of a winning attitude because he’s not afraid. But that doesn’t mean he has a winning attitude; it only means he hasn’t experienced any pain from his trading activities to make him afraid.

Now suppose that he hasn’t completely accepted the risk. What if his expectations didn’t take into account any market behavior other than what he wanted? From this mental perspective, if the market doesn’t do what he wants, he is going to feel pain—emotional pain. Expectations are our mental representations of how some future moment in the environment is going to look, sound, feel, smell, or taste. Depending upon how much energy is behind the expectation, it can hurt a lot when it isn’t fulfilled.

The problem is that preventing pain by avoiding losses can’t be done. The market generates behavior patterns and the patterns repeat themselves, but not every time. So again, there is no possible way to avoid losing or being wrong.

What he doesn’t realize is that, in spite of his enthusiasm, when he went from a carefree state of mind to a prevent-and-avoid mode of thinking, he shifted from a positive to a negative attitude.

Learning more and more about the markets only to avoid pain will compound his problems because the more he learns, the more he will naturally expect from the markets, making it all the more painful when the markets don’t do their part. He has unwittingly created a vicious cycle where the more he learns, the more debilitated he becomes; the more debilitated he becomes, the more he feel compelled to learn. The cycle will continue until he either quits trading in disgust or recognizes that the root cause of his trading problems is his perspective, not his lack of market knowledge.

The largest group, the remaining 40 to 50 percent of the active traders, are the “boom and busters.” They have learned how to make money, but they haven’t learned there’s a whole body of trading skills that have to be mastered in order to keep the money they make. As a result, their equity curves typically look like roller-coaster rides, with a nice, steady assent into a steep dropoff, then another nice, steady assent into another steep dropoff. The roller-coaster cycle continues on and on.

Probably one of the hardest concepts for traders to effectively assimilate is that the market doesn’t create your attitude or state of mind; it simply acts as a mirror reflecting what’s inside back to you.

If you want to change your experience of the markets from fearful to confident, if you want to change your results from an erratic equity curve to a steadily rising one, the first step is to embrace the responsibility and stop expecting the market to give you anything or do anything for you. If you resolve from this point forward to do it all yourself, the market can no longer be your opponent. If you stop fighting the market, which in effect means you stop fighting yourself, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you will recognize exactly what you need to learn, and how quickly you will learn it. Taking responsibility is the cornerstone of a winning attitude.

what separates the best traders from everyone else is not what they do or when they do it, but rather how they think about what they do and how they’re thinking when they do it.

The best traders stay in the flow because they don’t try to get anything from the market; they simply make themselves available so they can take advantage of whatever the market is offering at any given moment.

Accepting the risk means accepting the consequences of your trades without emotional discomfort or fear. This means that you must learn how to think about trading and your relationship with the markets in such a way that the possibility of being wrong, losing, missing out, or leaving money on the table doesn’t cause your mental defense mechanisms to kick in and take you out of the opportunity flow.

because energy can take on any size or dimension, but, in doing so, doesn’t actually take up any space.

it is extremely difficult to learn anything new if you’re afraid, because, as you already well know, fear is a very debilitating form of energy. It causes us to withdraw, to get ready to protect ourselves, to run, and to narrow our focus of attention—all of which makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to open ourselves in a way that allows us to learn something new.

If you can accept the fact that the market doesn’t generate positively or negatively charged information as an inherent characteristic of the way it expresses itself, then the only other way information can take on a positive or negative charge is in your mind, and that is a function of the way the information is processed.

If there is such a thing as a secret to the nature of trading, this is it: At the very core of one’s ability 1) to trade without fear or overconfidence, 2) perceive what the market is offering from its perspective, 3) stay completely focused in the “now moment opportunity flow,” and 4) spontaneously enter the “zone,” it is a strong virtually unshakeable belief in an uncertain outcome with an edge in your favor.

you will understand without a shred of doubt why your ultimate success as a trader cannot be realized until you develop a resolute, unshakeable belief in uncertainty.

Operating effectively in an environment that has qualities, traits, or characteristics that are different from what we’re used to requires making some adjustments or changes in the way we normally think about things. For example, if you were to travel to an exotic place with certain objectives or goals to accomplish, the first thing you would do is familiarize yourself with the local traditions and customs. By doing so, you would learn about the various ways in which you would have to adapt in order to function successfully in that environment. Traders frequently ignore the fact that they may have to adapt in order to become consistently successful traders. There are two reasons for this. The first is that you need absolutely no skill of any kind to put on a winning trade. For most traders it usually takes years of pain and suffering before they figure out or finally admit to themselves that there’s more to being consistent than the ability to pick an occasional winner. The second reason is that you don’t have to travel anywhere to trade. All you need is access to a phone. You don’t even have to roll out of bed in the morning. Even traders who normally trade from an office don’t have to be in the office to put on or take off their trades. Because we can access and interact with the market from personal environments that we are intimately familiar with, it seems as if trading won’t require any special adaptations in the way we think.

It isn’t difficult, therefore, to understand why so few people make it as traders. They simply don’t do the mental work necessary to reconcile the many conflicts that exist between what they’ve already learned and believe, and how that learning contradicts and acts as a source of resistance to implementing the various principles of successful trading. Getting into and taking advantage of the kind of free-flowing states of mind that are ideal for trading requires that those conflicts be thoroughly resolved.

Not predefining your risk, not cutting your losses, or not systematically taking profits are three of the most common—and usually the most costly—trading errors you can make. Only the best traders have eliminated these errors from their trading.

the degree by which you think you know, assume you know, or in any way need to know what is going to happen next, is equal to the degree to which you will fail as a trader.

On the other hand, why do you think unsuccessful traders are obsessed with market analysis. They crave the sense of certainty that analysis appears to give them. Although few would admit it, the truth is that the typical trader wants to be right on every single trade. He is desperately trying to create certainty where it just doesn’t exist. The irony is that if he completely accepted the fact that certainty doesn’t exist, he would create the certainty he craves: He would be absolutely certain that certainty doesn’t exist.

Any expectation about the market’s behavior that is specific, well-defined, or rigid—instead of being neutral and open-ended-is unrealistic and potentially damaging. I define an unrealistic expectation as one that does not correspond with the possibilities available from the market’s perspective. If each moment in the market is unique, and anything is possible, then any expectation that does not reflect these boundary-less characteristics is unrealistic.

In my workshops, I always ask participants to resolve the following primary trading paradox: In what way does a trader have to learn how to be rigid and flexible at the same time? The answer is: We have to be rigid in our rules and flexible in our expectations. We need to be rigid in our rules so that we gain a sense of self-trust that can, and will always, protect us in an environment that has few, if any, boundaries. We need to be flexible in our expectations so we can perceive, with the greatest degree of clarity and objectivity, what the market is communicating to us from its perspective.

Carefree means confident, but not euphoric. When you are in a carefree state of mind, you won’t feel any fear, hesitation, or compulsion to do anything, because you’ve effectively eliminated the potential to define and interpret market information as threatening. To remove the sense of threat, you have to accept the risk completely. When you have accepted the risk, you will be at peace with any outcome. To be at peace with any outcome, you must reconcile anything in your mental environment that conflicts with the five fundamental truths about the market. What’s more, you also have to integrate these truths into your mental system as core beliefs.

What Is Objectivity? Objectivity is a state of mind where you have conscious access to everything you have learned about the nature of market movement. In other words, nothing is being blocked or altered by your pain-avoidance mechanisms.