We’ve all experienced boredom from time to time, and in today’s day and age, the human race has spent a lot of resources developing all kinds of inventions to help us curb those feelings of being bored. Forex traders are especially prone to boredom when the market isn’t jumping because we thrive off of volatility and want to be kept on our toes. Unfortunately, some of us tend to abandon things once they become boring. We change the channel, we put down a book and never pick it up again, we lose interest and move on. Trading is no exception – many traders walk away because trading just doesn’t keep their attention.
So, maybe you’ve tried to spice things up while you’re trading so that you won’t lose interest. You might play the radio in the background, turn on the tv, or introduce some sort of auditory/visual stimuli. You open Facebook on another tab and start scrolling away, you check your Instagram, you find something else to do. What you might not realize is that these distractions can actually have a negative impact on your trading results. If you aren’t focused, you might miss out on market information, overlook chart patterns you should have spotted, and make other mistakes. So how do you deal with the boredom without distracting yourself in the meantime?
The key here is for your mind to be focused on trading without having to multitask. One thing you can try is to trade during your most productive time of the day. In the morning, right after drinking a hot cup of coffee and eating breakfast can be a great time to really tune and focus before everyday stresses can affect you. On the contrary, you might not perform as well in the morning if you’re more of a night owl. Being well-rested is a good start to having a clear head.
What you don’t want to do is deal with trading boredom by introducing negative habits. Some examples of this would be overtrading, forcing trades, or risking more money to feel some excitement. This might cure your boredom in the moment, but it can lead to losses that could have easily been avoided if you would have been patient. You have to think about how entering a trade just to do so could cause you to lose money and how it is completely unproductive to do so. You might feel unproductive by doing nothing, but it is better to do nothing if it means you’ll avoid losing money. It’s just like sitting at home on a rainy day – if you have to go out, you’re going to spend money. If you can sit back and be patient, you can save those funds for something else.
At the end of the day, you’re going to have to embrace the fact that boredom will occur from time to time when you’re trading. Rather than trying to curb that boredom with distractions that can cause you to lose focus, you need to learn the art of trading discipline and patience. Try to trade during your most productive time of day and think of any activities you could do before trading to improve your focus, like jogging, mediation, yoga, drinking coffee, etc. If you’re ever feeling eager to enter a trade just because, consider the trade’s risk-to-reward ratio and ask yourself if evidence really supports entering that trade, or if you’re only looking to add some excitement.