Something that I’ve noticed over the years as a professional trader who has coached thousands of aspiring (and now successful) traders, and more recently taught through my trading mentorship program, is that most novice traders really struggle with overcoming hesitation to execute on clear trade setups.

Hesitation is one of the biggest challenges new traders face in their journeys to becoming proficient and profitable traders. Being able to quickly execute trades when completely valid trade opportunities present themselves is at the heart of being an effective trader.

Hesitating on trades has a huge opportunity cost, and it’s something that even seasoned traders fall victim to. By being decisive and confident in your trade ideas, you can act fast on setups that align with your trading plan and enter positions that are likely to produce a net positive return over a large sample size of trades. With that said, let's move onto how you as a trader can overcome hesitation in trading.

Understanding the Root Cause of Hesitation

To become a consistent trader, you need to know what's causing you to hesitate to enter trades in the first place. More often than not, it's a lack of confidence in your trading plan or even your strategy that leads to this hesitation.

A Lack of Confidence in the Trading Strategy

If you're a complete beginner, you might not have confidence in the trading strategy you’re employing or even worse, you don’t have a trading strategy in place at all. This is actually more common than you might think. There are plenty of brand new traders that either will just try to trade on gut instinct with no clear strategy, or even worse than that, they strategy hop without fully testing each strategy.

Something that I teach my students in the Blackwatch Advisory is that price action strategies (like the one I teach in my trading mentorship) are known for being a lot more reliable than other types of strategies that rely heavily on indicators. This allows new traders to quickly build confidence in their trading as they witness how often valid setups result in winning trades, giving them the confidence they need to actually enter the market when they come.

Knowing your trading plan like the back of your hand, having all the steps well-defined and documented, and backtesting a proven strategy are all great ways to build trust in yourself as a trader. If the trading strategy you’re using has been proven to work, whether by virtue of your own testing or because others are using it to get funding and get payouts from prop firms, hesitation becomes a lot easier to deal with.

Fear of Taking Losses

One of the biggest obstacles that new traders face in terms of hesitation is the fear of taking losses. Being afraid to lose money is a completely natural thing that probably 90% of people deal with whether they’re traders or not. This is why trading is often touted as a very counter-intuitive profession. But, just like business–and trading is a business, you gotta risk it for the biscuit.

However, being overly cautious and being afraid of losing a single trade often leads to hesitation, and that leads to missed opportunities. The reality is that a single losing trade won’t cause you to lose that prop firm challenge either, so really as long as the strategy you’re trading is sound, you’ve put the work in to understand it, test it, and collect data, that fear is completely irrational.

First and foremost, by having a well-defined trading strategy that you've tested, you can mitigate a lot of the risk associated with trading. However, what you need to be aware of is that risk and loss is a part of trading, and you will lose trade from time to time.

However, with proper risk management techniques, such as utilizing stop loss levels at the appropriate price levels, you can overcome hesitation in trading, and more importantly, get rid of that pesky fear that's holding you back. Risk management is a core aspect of trading that I teach within The Advisory program.

The Role of Discipline in Trading

Beginner traders often aren't all that disciplined, which is unfortunate, because discipline is crucial to overcoming hesitation in trading. So let’s dig into discipline and how we can build it as traders.

Execution Discipline

In this sense, discipline is about your ability to consistently follow your trading plan without second guessing yourself or deviating from the plan because of those annoying transient emotional impulses.

Again, you should have a defined, tested, and proven trading strategy in place and you won’t need to “think” about whether or not to enter, you just do it… according to the rules outlined in your plan.

If you're disciplined, it means that you'll follow your strategy no matter what. It doesn’t matter if you’re having a good day, or bad day. Whether you feel “on” or not. It's all about acting with a sense of haste when you’re supposed to.

Emotional Discipline

Much of this lack of discipline has to do with emotions. Whether it's anger, fear, or greed, these are all emotions that can (and will) cloud your judgment while trading.

For instance, whether you're fearful of losing money or are being greedy and are chasing bigger profits, fear can cause you to hesitate and miss an opportunity, while greed can cause you to hold a trade for longer than your trade management rules allow for.

To maintain emotional control during trading, always stick to your trading strategy and don't let past losses or wins affect your decision making process or whether or not your get into future trades. If your strategy works, trust your better judgment and execute the trades.

Detaching from Outcome

Understandably, much of the hesitation in trading has to do with the outcome of your trades. Every trader wants to make money, but does that mean profiting from every trade? The answer is no. It’s nearly impossible to win every single trade.

As I mentioned above, you are going to lose some trades, and that’s just one of the costs of doing business in this profession.

Focus on Process Over Profits

If you're overly attached to the outcome, or in other words, 100% focused on winning every single trade, you're going to end up hesitating. If you’re only focused on the outcome, you are always going to be fearful of placing a losing trade, and that hesitation will not only cost you opportunities to generate profits, but it can also cause some people to chase the market and revenge trade, or even worse, start to overtrading to compensate.

Therefore, the better method here–rather than focusing on the outcome, is to focus on executing the plan to the best of your ability. If you have a solid trading plan in place and it has proven to provide results in the past, then you have no reason to deviate from it or to hesitate.

Overcoming the Fear of Losing Money

For the vast majority of traders, the number one cause of hesitation is the simple fear of losing money. Obviously, no one wants to lose money, but like I iterated earlier in the article, it’s just something that’s going to happen as a part of being in this business.

The only real way to overcome hesitation in trading that is caused by a fear of losing money is to only trade with money that you can afford to lose, and to build up your tolerance to taking losses, something that will come naturally to you with time.

Building Confidence through Consistent Practice

This, combined with constant practice, will allow you to become a consistent trader and gradually reduce your fear of losing money. The more confident you get through practice, the less fearful you'll be, and the more comfortable you’ll be with putting money, or that prop firm account on the line.

Practical Tips to Overcome Hesitation

To round things off, let me provide you with a few practical tips to help you overcome hesitation in trading.

• Keep a Trading Journal: An easy way to overcome hesitation is to use a trading journal. Keep track of every trade, particularly when you hesitate. By doing so, you can identify triggers that caused you to hesitate in the first place.
  
  

• Develop a Pre-Trading Routine: Everybody is different, so the pre-trading routine you develop will depend on you. Whatever it may be, a routine that makes you feel confident and ready for a day of trading is called for.
  
  

• Focus What’s In Front of You: Focus on the data that's in front of you, in the moment. Either price makes sense to you, or it doesn't. Don't force things–trust your knowledge and the effort you've put in. Trust what the charts are telling you and trade what you see, not what you hope will happen, and this way you won't destroy your confidence by forcing trades and taking losses.

“Scared Money Don't Make No Money” -YG

By being confident, disciplined, and detached from the end result, you can overcome hesitation in trading. Remember, as a beginner, you're more likely to hesitate than later on down the line, so an essential element here is practice. By consistently practicing by doing things like end of day markups and a bit of sim trading, you’ll naturally gain confidence in your trading capabilities and overcome all that hesitation for good.