One of the most important qualities of the professional trader is the ability to manage your psychological state.
Psychology is such an important component of shorter term trading that it can make all the difference between success and failure.
In my own trading, the essential state of mind I must be in to trade at an optimal level is what I call the “zero-state”.
For me, it represents an emotionally neutral state that is neither happy nor sad, neither overconfident nor fearful. The adjective “calm” starts to come close to what I mean but there is an important difference. “
Calm” is part of an adjective pair, whose partner has precisely the opposite meaning. “Stormy” is usually given as the antonym. For me, this moment is one that may not be contained in a conventional adjective that describes a state, because I associate adjectives as being part of a word pair, with its opposite on the other side of the continuum whose exact center I think of as “zero”, as on the number line.
Conceptually, the Japanese term “mu” comes fairly close to this idea, having been variously described as neither yes nor no, but a state in-between that does not acknowledge the question being asked as one that may be answered by wither yes or now, with the answer existing in a different plane of reality.
Serenity is a word that describes a state that comes even closer than calm, because it suggests for me something more like a timeless eternity of “no-emotion”, where I am not connected to the outcome in a personal meaningful way.
For me the pure form of the act of trading is to achieve a timeless correctness, to take actions or to refrain from actions in perfect balance with the needs of the market t that moment, to be nothing more or less than that which is required ideally.
In Cartesian coordinates the point (0,0), is called the origin and is central to all subsequent mathematical operations. It is the point from which all action begins and where excursions are grounded for reference. It is the ultimate reference point that links together individual cases .