Set and forget trading is a phrase that I coined several years back in an article I wrote on the topic. It’s a trading approach that works if you follow it, to put it simply. For this reason, I write about it often, and those of you who have been following me for some time no doubt understand the main benefits of the set and forget trading approach.

However, in today’s lesson, I want to focus on the psychological aspects and benefits of the set and forget approach and why it will help your trading performance, based on my personal experiences.

We get many members who email us regularly with success stories after they have adopted the set and forget approach. Hopefully, more of you will start trialing this concept because there is nothing that makes me happier than hearing my students’ success stories.

As you may already know from some of my other articles on this topic, set and forget trading works partially because of the way it helps you to systemize the entry, stop and target of your trades. By allowing the edge to play out uninterrupted, without you fiddling with it for arbitrary reasons, your long-term trading performance will improve simply as a ‘side-effect’.

However, there are also some very important mental benefits of set and forget trading which I don’t often discuss.

In this lesson, I want to focus on the psychological benefits of set and forget trading to help more of you make the mental transition to this style of trading. By committing to the trade completely before you even place it, it means you’re identifying the trade, placing the orders and walking away with very little monitoring. It also means being at peace and avoiding the emotional ups and downs that come with watching your trades as they are live. It means walking away and letting the market ‘do the work’ whilst you go do something more productive or fun. It means removing yourself from the temptations of chart-watching and getting influenced by chart whipsaws from news releases, short-term volatility and so on. In short, it means setting and forgetting!

Mental advantages…

1. Significantly Reduce Stress & Emotional Ups & Downs

Trading can be as stressful or as stress-free as you want it to be, it all depends on what you do. If you sit there staring at the charts all night when you should be asleep, you are doing to drive-up your body’s stress response and your cortisol (stress hormone) levels will sky-rocket both from the lack of sleep and from over-thinking about your trades.

Now, as if the stress wasn’t bad enough, it’s going to get worse. You’re also going to hurt your trading performance by doing what I described above, this will work to further increase your stress levels. Eventually, you will be tired, angry, frustrated, on the verge of tears and left with an empty trading account.

2. Help Cure Your passion Chart-Watching

Have you ever heard of positive reinforcement? It’s when you get a reward from doing the right thing, this will then reinforce whatever the ‘right thing’ was that you did so that hopefully you keep doing it. It works on kids and it can work on adults too, especially in trading.

When you watch charts all the time, you are probably going to lose money, so the chart-watching is a negative behavior. The tricky part here is that the act of chart-watching can feel very good while you’re doing it (dopamine – the chemical in your brain that gives you the rush you get from the ‘hope’ of making money), so you are essentially getting a mental reward from committing a negative behavior and you are reinforcing a negative behavior by continuing to do this. Therefore, traders get stuck in an addictive cycle of watching charts, making the same mistakes over and over and losing money.

3. Sleep at Night – Know What You Stand to Lose or Make

Sleep is critical to all body and mental process in the human body. There are thousands of studies on this. I can tell you for a 100% iron-clad fact that IF you are losing sleep from watching charts and worrying about losing too much or not winning enough, you are hurting your trading performance and you are starting down the road to reinforcing negative trading habits as we discussed in point 2.

When you are using set and forget trading, your stop loss and profit targets are pre-defined, so you know what you stand to lose and what you stand to win on any given trade. I can tell you from experience, this makes it a lot easier to get and stay asleep at night so don’t under-estimate this benefit!

4. Exercise the Mental Muscles of Routine & Discipline

When you make the commitment to start set and forget trading, you are kicking off a process that is self-reinforcing and will continue to strengthen the longer you use it. The power of routine and discipline, of repeating an effective system or process and staying accountable to THAT, will help you accelerate your development of the proper trading habits.

Once you have the proper trading habits in place you will see improved trading performance which gives rise to a huge surge of trading confidence in both yourself and what you’re doing. This reinforces the routine you started with and it all stems from committing to the set and forget trading approach.

5. Confidence Through Achieving Better Trading Results

Confidence in business, trading or even in your personal life is something that truly is so important that it has no dollar value; it is invaluable. Confidence breeds more confidence and it works to reinforce those positive trading habits we discussed earlier. By trading properly not only are you reinforcing positive trading habits but you’re breeding confidence in yourself and your ability to stick to a plan, this confidence helps you stick to what was working. It’s all a positive feedback loop as I said before.

Confidence is spawned by the momentum of winning trades or at the very least, having better trading experiences and having more control over the capital in your account; the strategic planning that set and forget allows, that results in improved results. It’s not going to happen all at once, but over time, when you master this style of trading, you will start to feel more in control because you’re controlling the things you can and not trying to control the things you can’t (the market’s movement is uncontrollable).

Conclusion

I focus on the set and forget approach and 95% of the time I will resign to the fact I’m about to lose XYZ or make XYZ on a trade; this works to eliminate the potential of making emotional mistakes. The expectancy of my trading method combined with the set and forget money management approach has helped me, as well as many of my students improve their trading. It’s not an exact science, and of course there will be times trades are adjusted and there are times that no amount of mechanical money management can override the natural human emotion of trading, but we are not after perfection, we are after training and exercising the mind to be able to let go of the need to control the outcomes and control the market, after all the market is going to do what it’s going to do with or without us watching it or trading it. All we can do is control ourselves and our own behaviors in the market and that is what set and forget trading is all about.