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‘Don’t be emotional’
It might be the most repeated piece of advice in trading.

I hear it from new traders and seasoned ones. I hear it from people who coach traders for a living. I think it’s wrong.

And after 25+ years of doing this work, I’ve watched it quietly do real damage. I’ve sat across from some of the best traders in the world. Different markets, different styles, holding periods from seconds to months. None of them were unemotional.

What they had was a different relationship with what they felt. The science settled this a long time ago.

Neurologist and scientist Antonio Damasio studied a patient, known in the literature as Elliot, after surgery for a frontal lobe tumor. His IQ was intact. His memory was fine. He could reason through a problem in impressive detail. But his decision-making was severely compromised.

Patients with this kind of damage could spend half an hour weighing two possible dates for their next appointment. The connection between the prefrontal cortex and the brain’s emotional circuitry had been disrupted. Without emotional signal, every option carried the same weight, and logic had nothing to push against.

Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s work goes further. Your brain is constantly predicting what your body will need next, and much of what we experience as emotion is the brain making sense of those bodily signals. Emotion is built into how the brain decides what matters.

So the trader trying to feel nothing is chasing something the human brain can’t do. What happens when you try anyway.

Early in my clinical psychology training, one principle got drilled into us. Emotion that isn’t felt and understood tends to get acted out.

In trading, acting out has names.

• The impulse trade.
• The revenge trade after a loss you never let yourself feel.
• Chasing a move because sitting with the sting of missing it felt intolerable.
• Moving your stop so you don’t have to experience being wrong.

Every one of these is an attempt to get away from a feeling. The behavior ends up doing the job the feeling was never allowed to do. Telling yourself not to be emotional leaves the emotion fully intact and pushes it below awareness, where it keeps voting on your decisions without you watching.

That’s how the Inner Market ends up running your book. Emotion is information.

Fear in a position might be telling you your size is too big. It might also be an old blowup replaying itself onto today’s chart. Frustration might point to a broken process, or to an expectation you never examined.

You can’t tell which until you’re willing to feel it and look at it.

And feeling it means the body. Emotion always has a somatic component. A tight chest. Held breath. A jaw that’s been clenched since the open. Most traders notice these after the damage is done. The work is noticing earlier.

Emotion is also fuel. The word comes from Latin, ‘to move’.
In English, the word ‘emotion’ is the word motion with an E in front – Energy in Motion.

It’s the energy behind pulling the trigger, cutting a loser, sitting through heat in a good trade.

Strip it out and you’d have a trader who can’t act or has poor self-control. Where intuition comes from. In the Iowa Gambling Task (google it or ask your favorite chatbot for details).

Clinical neurologist and neuroscientist Antionio Damasio’s research found that people’s bodies started reacting to the losing decks, measurable spikes in skin conductance, before they could consciously say anything was wrong. The body knew first.

That’s about as good a working description of trader intuition as I’ve found. Pattern recognition that arrives as a felt sense before it becomes a thought.

Traders who’ve spent years numbing themselves often tell me they have no intuition. Usually they do. They’ve trained themselves not to listen to it.

I see the same thing in my executive coaching with venture capitalists and tech leaders. The ones who decide well under uncertainty are rarely the coolest people in the room. They tend to read their own signals with unusual precision. What changes.

When a trader starts treating emotion as information instead of an enemy, something loosens.

Less energy goes into suppression. Less shame about having feelings in the first place. More attention is left over for the actual market.

Self-control gets easier too, which surprises people.

You can regulate what you’re aware of. What you refuse to feel, you mostly end up obeying.

So the next time something rises up in you mid-trade, don’t rush to make it go away. Get curious about it. Put it into words on paper. Some days what it’s pointing at is the market. Early on, more often than not, it’s pointing at you.