Top 10 Trading Emotions (and How to Actually Deal With Them)

Most blowups aren’t bad setups. They’re bad reactions to good setups. That was the premise Stavros Georgiadis, CFA, Stock Market Trading, opened with in his NinjaTrader Ecosystem webinar, and it reframes the entire conversation about performance. He said if something isn’t working in your trading right now, whether you trade futures, stocks, or any other financial instrument, the strategy is usually not the culprit.

Georgiadis pointed to an old trading floor saying: the market is 20% strategy and 80% psychology. The market does not care whether you are a good trader, a good person, or a good businessperson. It just moves, every day. Same setup, different mood, different outcome, and that’s not a strategy problem.

Across the session, he worked through emotions that can quietly wreck good setups and paired each one with a specific fix.

 

Why the problem probably isn’t your strategy

 

Georgiadis was blunt about the diagnosis: fix your head, and the profit and loss follows. You don’t need more indicators. You need control over your reactions. His framing throughout was that trading should run like a business, which means you stop trading like a gambler and start trading like a machine.

He also made the timing explicit. If you are still trading on emotion, stop today—not tomorrow, not next week, not next month.

 

The emotions that wreck good setups

 

Fear

You feel fear when you don’t know what to do. It shows up as hesitation, never pulling the trigger, exiting far too early, or cutting winners short so you don’t hand your gains back to the market. Georgiadis reads hesitation as a diagnostic: if you’re afraid of a trade, something in the plan is off, and the risk management is not solid.

His fix is three decisions made before entry: a clear entry, a clear exit, and whether the trade is worth taking at all. Settle those in advance and the choice no longer depends on how you feel. If you’re still scared, the position may simply be too big, so resize it and reduce.

Greed

Greed makes you hold too long or size too big. In Georgiadis’ own early career, it looked like moving stops further away to give the market room and adding to winners with no logic behind it with the hope that more would work. He wasn’t satisfied with the money his plan was already set to make, and he didn’t want to take a loss. That, he said, is pure greed.

The counter he uses daily is partial profits at predefined targets. Once profit is booked, greed has nothing left to work with. He also writes down his maximum position size before the session and never touches it live. If the day reaches its target, he shuts the platform down. Today went well; tomorrow is another session, and the market will still be there.

Revenge

Revenge is the most dangerous of the group and the easiest to recognize. You take a loss and jump into a new trade seconds later, not minutes or hours, because you want it back fast. Georgiadis keeps a written rule set he reviews every day, and it tells him revenge leads nowhere in the short term or the long term.

Start from the premise that you cannot always win, and that anyone claiming otherwise is lying to you. Successful trading is a game of odds, so a single loss doesn’t make you a bad trader. Set a hard daily loss limit and treat it exactly like a stop, with no improvising and no negotiating. When you hit it, close the computer and take a walk.

Hope

Hope has no place in a trading plan. It makes traders hold losers far too long, and it makes them ignore a stop on the belief that price will bounce, which only grows the loss when it doesn’t. Georgiadis’ line here was the sharpest of the session: your stop-loss order is the trade talking, and you should listen to it. The test is straightforward: if you wouldn’t enter this trade right now, you shouldn’t still be in it.

Regret

Regret sends you chasing a move you already missed, and it makes you second-guess a good decision once you see the outcome. Georgiadis answers it with the arithmetic of opportunity: a missed trade is not a loss, and another setup is coming in the next hour, the next day, or the next month.

Judge the decision by the process, not by a result you can’t undo. The work is getting incrementally better, day after day.

Overconfidence

This one often surprises people, since confidence sounds like an asset. Georgiadis included it because overconfidence puts you one step away from violating your own risk rules. A winning streak convinces you the market will keep cooperating and the profits will keep stacking. Nothing is guaranteed, and even the best setup can go against you.

Consistency is the safeguard: run the same checklist on your 100th trade that you ran on your first. If it works, something in the plan is right, so keep improving it. If it doesn’t, don’t read a hot streak as license to press your luck. Book the profits and run.

Impatience

Impatience shows up as entering before the setup confirms, and as the belief that you owe the market a trade every day. Conditions change. A heavy economic calendar tends to bring volatility, and volatility often brings opportunity. An empty calendar brings thin liquidity and a market that barely moves, and on that kind of day the conditions and the setups are simply not there.

Georgiadis also ties impatience to chart clutter. He recommends trading with as few indicators as possible, because one indicator saying long while another says short a few minutes later just produces confusion. Clean charts, clean setups.

Cash is a position, and sitting on your hands can be the wise move over the long run.

Anxiety

Staring at your live profit and loss (P&L) doesn’t move it. Anxiety pushes traders to close winners early and take the uncomfortable stop instead.

Georgiadis’ own answer runs through the platform. He uses trailing stops and advanced trade management (ATM) strategies in NinjaTrader, so profit locks in as the position moves in his favor, long or short, and his stop is placed automatically the moment he enters. With risk set in advance, the anxiety disappears, and a bad trade damages neither his psychology nor his account.

For anyone not there yet, hide the live P&L and check it only when you’re finished trading for the day. If you still feel anxious, trade smaller. Risking $150 or $100 per trade instead of $300 is a reasonable way to rebuild confidence.

Boredom

Boredom is the flip side of patience. Two hours into the session with nothing to show, the temptation is to take a marginal setup just to be in the market. Georgiadis overtraded on slow, choppy days years ago; it didn’t work for him then, and he doesn’t expect it to work for anyone else over the long term.

Set a maximum number of trades per day and stop when you reach it. He fixes that number before the session, usually two, three, or as many as five on a good day. And when boredom hits, treat it as a signal to review your journal, not to open another chart.

FOMO

Fear of missing out (FOMO) pulls traders into setups that have already completed, most often around financial news, when volatility is running high. Georgiadis doesn’t take those trades at all.

If you missed the entry, you missed it. There may well be another setup in 10 or 20 minutes. The goal is protecting your capital and applying solid risk management, not catching every move.

Panic

Panic closes everything the second the market turns choppy and flattens the whole book on one red candle. If your stop is set, a fast candle doesn’t change the plan, so let the trade work. The loss is already defined, which leaves nothing to panic about. Losses are a natural part of trading on probabilities.

Envy

Envy is taking a trade because someone you follow posted a screenshot. Georgiadis’ view is that if social media is driving your entries, the trading plan needs rebuilding from point zero, assuming there’s a plan at all.

Compare today’s version of you to yesterday’s version, not to a stranger’s P&L post. You are the trader, and you are running the business. Leaning on other traders is also fragile. If they disappear tomorrow, you are left with nothing to trade on.

 

The pattern behind all of them

 

Every one of these emotions runs the same loop: a feeling hits, you act on it, it goes badly, and the feeling gets louder the next time. Georgiadis’ point is that the loop has exactly one controllable step, and it’s the second one. You cannot stop the feeling from arriving. You can stop it from driving.

 

What trading without emotion actually looks like

 

Not feeling nothing. Just never letting the feeling decide. The setup Georgiadis described comes down to four pieces:

1. Clear rules written down before the bell, covering entries, exits, size, and maximum loss
2. A journal that tags the feeling behind each trade
3. One checklist, followed every time
4. Position sizing small enough that no single trade can rattle you

A good trade or a bad trade means nothing on its own. Results come from thousands of trades and the statistics they produce.

 

The four-step pre-trade routine

 

He closed with a routine that leaves no room for feelings:

1. Check the economic calendar.
2. Trust your plan.
3. Stay patient.
4. Do not hesitate.

On that last step: if the signal matches your rules and your risk management, hit the button and don’t think about it. Then feel confident, but not overconfident. Confidence comes from following rules. Overconfidence assumes yesterday’s winning setup owes you the same result today, and it leaves you frustrated when it doesn’t.

 

Key takeaways

 

• Most blowups come from bad reactions to good setups, not from bad setups.
• Decide your entry, exit, and position size before the session, and don’t change them live.
• Hard daily loss limits and profit targets set in advance remove the two decisions emotion most wants to make.
• A missed trade is not a loss, and a hot streak is not a reason to size up.
• The best traders aren’t fearless; they just don’t decide with their gut.

 

Watch the session

 

Georgiadis walks through each emotion, the fix he uses in his own trading, and the full case for a rules-based system. Watch the full webinar on YouTube.