Adrienne Laris Toghraie is an internationally recognized authority in the field of human development and a master practitioner of Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) for the financial and business communities. She is the founder of Trading on Target and Enriching Life Seminars, companies dedicated to helping traders, salespeople, and other high achievers to increase profits and success. Using her 20 years of study in the science of modeling excellence/NLP and other forms of psychological development, Toghraie has helped her clients push through their self-imposed limitations to new levels of success. Her seminars and private counseling have achieved a wide level of recognition and popularity, as well as her television appearances on CNBC and keynote addresses at most of the major industry conferences.
STOCKS & COMMODITIES Editor Jayanthi Gopalakrishnan interviewed
Adrienne Toghraie on November 5, 2007.
The belief your emotions are not involved in your trading is not true; they are involved and they should be involved.
Adrienne, thank you for taking the time
to speak with me. Why don't you start by telling us what you do?
I work with people who want to become more successful. Since 1989, I have specialized in helping traders and investors reach their next level of success by overcoming their self-imposed limitations. I do this through several types of studies, one of which is Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), the science of modeling. I have also integrated over 20 other disciplines into my practice to form my own method.
What are some of the issues you see most traders facing in their trading?
I can sum it up by saying it's all about fear. Fear has many faces. Some of the faces of fear are fear of success, fear of being wrong, fear of failure, limiting beliefs — anything that holds the person back from following his or her own rules, because ultimately a trader must follow those rules.
Fear of loss is probably the most prevalent fear in trading. People are afraid of loss because it is a part of everything negative that has ever happened in their lives. These feelings of loss are stored in themselves, in a dark and disturbing place that is impossible for most people to access on their own. And even if they do, they do not know how to deal with it, much less transform it.
If traders are in a negative state when they are trading, they are more likely to revisit this place. When they do, the result is taking the wrong action. They are also likely to fall into this dark place whenever they take a series of trades that result in a drawdown. The resulting loss becomes not only about that loss, but about all the losses in their life. That explains why a $200 loss can be so painful.
I've been through it myself. You tend to blame other people or situations for that loss. What puzzles me is that people work so hard at creating a trading system where everything is spelled out for them such as exits and entries. The objective of that system is to protect their capital. But oftentimes things go wrong. Why is that?
Why do things go wrong? To answer that question, I have to first explain that I incorporate intuition and fundamentals in my definition of a system. So a trader creates his methodology or system to cover all types of entry and exits in a trade and includes his theory of why entering and exiting a trade in this way is going to work. But this is just one variable in the trading equation. And it had better be a really good one, carefully developed and tested.
The second variable in the trading equation is your management. What is it? Is it well-conceived and can you follow it?
Now there's the third variable in your equation, very possibly the most
important one, and that's you. You are the instrument required to make
it all work. Let's say that you have the most wonderful Stradivarius violin,
worth millions of dollars, and you know that if it's handled correctly,
you're going to make beautiful music on it. Then you pick up the Stradivarius
and you try to play it but it doesn't sound good. So you develop a technique
and you start playing the violin using your technique. It begins to sound
good but it's still not sounding great because you haven't put yourself
and your emotions into your playing. If you watch the faces of the greatest
violinists in the world, like Jascha Heifetz, or one of the great cellists,
Gregor Piatigorsky, you can see their emotions become part of their music
and their instruments.
...Continued in the January 2008 issue of Technical Analysis
of STOCKS & COMMODITIES
Excerpted from an article originally published in the January 2008 issue
of Technical Analysis of STOCKS & COMMODITIES magazine. All rights
reserved. © Copyright 2007, Technical Analysis, Inc.
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