Your Past Is Costing You Money.

You think you are reacting to the chart in front of you. Sometimes you are reacting to people who are not even in the room. Your father, your mother, an ex, a mentor. Someone you are still trying to prove wrong, or trying to become.

Until you see how your past affects your trading, you can spend years calling it a discipline issue when you are repeating previous relationship problems with the market.

You Are Never Just Trading the Chart

Traders sit in front of the market and say the same things. I had FOMO. I cut a winner early. I oversized. I cannot handle losing.

Those behaviours are the symptoms traders blame. The more useful question sits underneath them: why does this behaviour feel necessary to you in the first place?

There is the trader, seemingly trading the market in the present. And there is an accumulation of past unresolved charges logged in the subconscious mind, shaping how that trader perceives the market, what they decide and what they do.

Trading is the ideal environment for old patterns to resurface because it contains all of it at once: money, uncertainty, control, rejection, success, failure, reward and status, and it puts you in front of those polarities in a very short space of time.

How Your Past Shows Up in Your Trades

Your early relationships and your experiences with money quietly shape the meaning you attach to control, risk, winning, losing, scarcity, success and failure. A few of the ways that plays out:

• You perceived your parents as reckless with money, and resent it. Holding onto profits can feel unsafe.
• You were infatuated with someone who made money quickly. That can drive gambling patterns and impulsive, reckless trading.
• You perceived yourself in scarcity. Gains can feel temporary, so you do what you can to squander them.
• You resented controlling figures. Your own trading rules start to feel restrictive, and sticking to your plan can feel like submission.
• You idolised someone financially successful or aggressive. Overtrading and oversizing become an attempt to be like them, and patience starts to feel like cowardice.
• You spent years trying to prove yourself. Every loss can feel like a personal regression and a threat to your identity.
• You resented people you perceived as weak. You may refuse to exit early, because exiting reads as weakness.

The charges do not have to be about family. They can sit in previous trading experiences: big wins and losses, passed and blown challenges, payouts received and payouts you got close to. They can come from past jobs, business ventures and relationships, from the elation of gaining something and the grief of losing it.

Anything perceived as an extreme high or an extreme low gets logged in the subconscious mind. When a current experience resembles it, there is a reaction to seek it or avoid it, split seconds before you are consciously aware of what you are doing.

Infatuation Runs You as Much as Resentment

Most traders only look at the painful side. Both sides take you away from being present with the market.

When you are infatuated with someone, you put them on a pedestal and yourself in their shadow. When you resent someone, you put yourself on the pedestal and them in the pit. Either way you are exaggerating or minimising yourself relative to another person, and that drives compensating behaviour in your trading.

The accumulation of these charges leads to an unrealistic expectation: a win without a loss, pleasure without pain, up without down. The market is two-sided and so are you. The pain you feel is in direct proportion to the one-sided fantasy you are holding, and it is there to break your attachment to it.

The Relationship Audit: Find Who Is Running Your Trading

This is the exercise I run through with the traders I work with. Take a piece of paper and a pen.

1. Write the names

Work through the list below and write down the individuals who come up with the highest charge, positive and negative. Go from the present day back to childhood.

• Yourself
• Your partner or spouse, your children, your parents and your siblings. These tend to be the big ones.
• Your closest friends and your extended family
• Current business or trading partners, mentors and coaches
• Close colleagues, team members, clients or students
• Former partners, former business or trading partners, former colleagues
• Your professional network and your community: the gym, clubs, people you see regularly
• The general public and strangers

2. Write three and three

Next to each name, write the three specific actions you perceive as most positive and the three you perceive as most negative. For yourself, that is the three things you are most proud of and the three you are most ashamed of.

Do both sides for everyone. Even with someone you dislike, there will be things you admire. Your infatuations drive your resentments, so working on only one side leaves the other running.

3. Find the big one

You will write a name down and know immediately that this is the one running you. If you resent them, you are fearful of gaining them. If you are infatuated with them, you are fearful of losing them. That fear is making decisions for you in the market and through day-to-day life.

Why Your Parents Matter Most

Most of the list is made of your own perceptions: things you saw, heard or felt someone do. Your parents are different. There is research suggesting that a parent's experiences can leave marks on their children that do not depend on the child remembering anything.

This is why, when I work with traders, a big place we go is those early moments with their parents, addressing both the infatuations and the resentments. If either is there, the parents are influencing decisions here and now.

This Is Not About Blame

The goal is not to go in and blame these people, or to say they are responsible for where you are.

It is not really the individuals who are running you. It is how you perceived what they did. That is good news, because your perception is the part you can be accountable for and the part you can change.

You may think you are trading the price in front of you. There is a whole accumulation behind it that affects your ability to see the market clearly, take wins and losses unemotionally and scale into larger capital. Note down what it is, and give yourself permission to address it.