However, I kept writing down what I was feeling the whole time. It helped a lot, and allowed me to let out the frustration I was feeling. AND it really helped me to manage my trade and what I was feeling… I can’t stress how much a difference writing down my emotions on simple lined paper has positively effected my trading.

Men have always had a disadvantage in trading because they’ve been told to “suck it up” when it comes to their emotions – mostly by men traders (not to mention by fathers, coaches, etc. in other fields of endeavor). One of the reasons that Denise is so good at what she does is that despite all her years in a ‘man’s’ field, she has resisted the brain washing about feelings.

We all spend a lot of time on market analysis. But when we sit in front of the charts, hour after hour, we are also learning at an unconscious level. It’s called implicit learning and part of it is the result of the mind’s amazing ability to recognize patterns. We ‘know’ something before the conscious mind can identify it. In Denise’s recent email she said that while in a trade, “Something doesn’t feel right”. She had seen that pattern before and her unconscious knew what it meant. She was able to use her feelings as bridge to the needed information: the trade wasn’t moving the way it should. That’s the way our implicit learning makes itself known… we have feelings.

Many, many years ago when I was a cop, I was driving by a strip mall early in the morning and saw a man making a phone call from a pay phone. Something about the situation didn’t ‘feel’ right. I decided to drive around the block and come back to check on him. A minute later, the dispatcher radioed there was a robbery in progress at the check-cashing store in the mall. I realized that the man I had seen was the lookout. My unconscious mind had been talking to me through my feelings.

Feelings are some of the very best data out there.

Oh, yes, we got the bad guy.