Trading psychology, in practical terms
Fear, greed, FOMO and tilt are not character flaws — they are predictable states with mechanical countermeasures. Here are the countermeasures.
Everyone agrees psychology matters and almost nobody says anything actionable about it. So: four states, what each one does to your decisions, and the specific rule that defuses it.
Fear
Fear makes you close winning trades early and skip valid setups. Both feel like caution at the time. The result is a trader whose winners are small and whose losers are full size — the exact opposite of what makes a method work.
The countermeasure is smaller size. Fear is almost always a signal that the position is too big for you, not that the trade is wrong. If a position makes you check the screen every thirty seconds, halve it. You will trade better at a size that bores you.
Greed
Greed shows up as moving your take profit further out mid-trade, adding to a winner without a plan, and sizing up after a good run. That last one is the dangerous one: a winning streak feels like proof of skill, and the size goes up precisely as the odds revert to normal. Many traders lose their entire year in the week after their best week.
The countermeasure is a fixed target set before entry, and a size that never changes because of recent results. Size changes on account balance, monthly, and on nothing else.
FOMO
A large candle prints, you were not in it, and it feels like money was taken from you. So you jump in late — right where the move is most likely to reverse. FOMO entries are consistently the worst entries a retail trader makes, because by definition they happen after the information is already in the price.
The countermeasure is a rule that missed moves are not tradeable. If your setup was not there before the candle, the candle did not create one. The market produces another opportunity every single day; there is no last bus.
Tilt
Borrowed from poker, and the most destructive state on the list. Tilt is the mode where you keep trading in order to change how you feel, rather than to execute a plan. You can recognise it from the inside: trades get bigger, the gap between them gets shorter, and you have stopped writing anything down.
The countermeasure is mechanical, because judgement is exactly what has failed. Three losses in a row, or 5% of the account down: platform closed, day over. Do not evaluate whether you feel fine. If you could evaluate that reliably, you would not be on tilt.
The two habits that support all four
A trade journal
One line per trade: what you took, why, what you risked, what happened, and how you felt. Five minutes a day. It is the only tool that shows you your own patterns — that, say, three quarters of your losses come after 9pm, or that every trade you described as "obvious" lost. You cannot see that from memory, because memory edits.
A pre-session ritual
Before you open the platform: read your four-line plan, state your maximum loss for the day out loud, and confirm you are not tired, angry or in a hurry. Traders who skip this step have no moment at which they can notice they should not be trading today.