Frustration among traders is very common when they go short on anticipation of bad economic data (or long on good economic data). This is due to the fact that in many cases the market does not always come down on bad economic data, or vice versa does not always rise on good economic data. Bad is good sometimes, and good is bad. Traders are frustrated because the market is not doing what they think it is 'supposed to do'.

We have all heard of the famous experiment by the Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov where dogs have been conditioned to expect food following a particular event. The Pavlov dogs have experienced the same sequence of events so often, at some point they know what's coming next without really thinking about it. They start to show emotions 'in advance', and salivate even before their food is served. This is one form of conditioning.

It's been over a year now since we've witnessed the so-called flash crash. On May 6th 2010, within minutes the markets dropped several percentages, then bounced and recovered a large part of the losses. To relive those exciting moments, here are some video clips. If you know of any other clip that should be here, please send me an email. This post with video clips is mostly fun, but it's also showing us panic, anxiety, greed and fear. Besides crash flash videos, there are some other clips that show the emotions that sometimes come with trading.

"Never complain, never explain" - it's a well known quote. Famous people have used it, management gurus have used it, too many to accurately determine who initially came up with it. Let's apply this to trading, because trading is probably the ultimate activity where this quote fits extremely well.

In this article, I would like to discuss the subject of overconfidence. Maybe in some way overconfidence can be looked at as the exact opposite of perfectionism. Neither emotions serve a trader well as they do not take the market (movement) for what it really is.

Some say in trading the true character of a person comes forward with all its strengths and weaknesses. Suppose a trader has a tendency to be perfect, to perform each and every little task in perfection. For people with perfectionism, it may not be that hard to function in everyday life, maybe with a little struggle here and there. But it's very hard to combine perfectionism with trading.

Being a short term trader, it's sometimes easy to forget about the larger picture. One could argue that short term traders couldn't care less about the larger picture or the long term view, but that's actually not the case. Trading is a game of chances, and as a trader, you make the trades that are likely to be successful. But it is also obvious that even trades that seem very likely to be successful can fail multiple times in a row.

If you have a losing trade that was stopped out, and maybe a string of losing trades, this might upset and frustrate you as a trader. You start to wonder how you ended up on the wrong side of the market each and every time.