Law of Attraction Meets Trading Psychology

Can the universe co-create your trading success? An increasing number of traders who follow the Law of Attraction and the concept of Manifestation believe so. To be clear, they are not throwing their trading plans out the window and hoping that the universe delivers profit into their accounts…they are leveraging the principles of manifestation to perform better in their trading and to accelerate the realization of their life-goals.

In a recent Twitter poll, 60% of traders reported believing in manifestation and the Law of Attraction, with 27% reporting not believing in them and just 13% reporting never having heard of the concepts.

Personal development Gurus like Joe Dispenza, Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle and even Oprah have popularized the concept in recent years. This is not a New Age concept though, the discipline actually has roots stretching back to the 1^st century and crosses religious and philosophical doctrines.

What is the Law of Attraction?

The Law of Attraction states that whatever you focus on you bring towards you and manifest into your reality. Based on the principle of “like attracts like”, the Law of Attraction encourages people to choose their thoughts, beliefs, energy and words mindfully. Proponents of the Law of Attraction believe that the law is always working, just like the law of gravity. 

“Whether consciously or unconsciously, you are the creator of your everyday experiences”

If you are unconsciously sending out negative thoughts, beliefs and words into the world, you will attract negative experiences that are matched with the energetic vibration of what you are emitting. Conversely, if you want to upgrade the quality of your reality, you can leverage this law to intentionally choose positive thoughts, beliefs, actions and words to experience higher-vibration results.

Want that beachfront mansion? You’re not going to get it by focusing on how many losing trades you had today and indulging your negative self-concept as a victim of the market. 

What is Manifestation?

Manifestation is the process by which people leverage the Law of Attraction to create desired results in their physical reality – dream holiday in Hawaii, fast-growing trading account, ditching the 9-5 to become a full time trader – you get the idea. The manifestation process relies on a number of specific principles which inform how a person should go about upgrading their reality and securing their desires in physical form.

So what if you’re a die-hard fan of scientific, evidence-based techniques? Does the Law of Attraction seem a little too *woo woo* to invest your trust in (and potentially the health of your trading account?).

Here’s the good news…

There actually IS a scientific basis to the principles of manifestation. At least if we are looking through the lens of performance and trading psychology. Each of the following manifestation techniques that I am about to share with you have been researched and empirically proven within the field of performance psychology (albeit with no intentional reference to the Law of Attraction or manifestation). 

The main differentiating factor between the performance psychology and manifestation schools of thought is the mechanism by which the techniques achieve their results. Performance psychology explains the efficacy of each technique from the perspective of within-person factors (e.g. activation of neural pathways, influence of the subconscious mind on guiding our actions etc.). Manifestation, on the other hand, incorporates the role of a higher power or universal consciousness in how these techniques help us manifest our desired results.

The bottom line is that believers and non-believers alike can benefit from these top 7 trading psychology tips that align with the principles of manifestation. Implement these 7 techniques to bring about better trading performance and maximize profits.

7 Tips to Manifest Better Trading Results and Level Up Your Wealth

1.     BE SPECIFIC ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT

When it comes to stating our desires – trading-related or otherwise, the more specific the better. Imagine the trader who sets out with the goal of “being a profitable trader” versus the trader who sets out a goal to be in a position to leave their 9-5 job in one year by growing their account by 10% each month. The latter trader is much more focused and intentional with setting out their vision and therefore can take more specific actions to achieve it.

2. WRITE DOWN YOUR GOALS

According to performance psychology, the very act of writing down your goals makes you more likely to achieve them. People who write down their goals have been shown to persist longer in the face of adversity, have higher levels of confidence and motivation for achieving their goals and ultimately are more successful in achieving them than those people who don’t document them. 

Manifestation details how you can achieve your desires by first getting specific about what they are and then “asking for them” by petitioning the universe through journaling, prayer, meditation, speaking them aloud, creating a vision board or visualizing yourself achieving them.

3. TAKE INTENTIONAL ACTION TOWARDS YOUR GOALS

It’s not enough to just write down your specific desires and then lie back on a sunbed and wait until the benevolent universal tide brings you your results. Stating your intentions is the first part of the process. The second part is taking intentional action. I’m stressing the word intentional here because it pays to be strategic about the actions you are taking.

If your desire is to increase your trading account size by 10% each month, you can’t just focus on your P&L and expect success. The trader who only sets goals and takes actions based on their P&L is setting themselves up to break their trading rules and lose a lot of money to the market. The only way to be consistently profitable as a trader is to consistently execute your trading plan. Your goals should be aligned with this fact.

Instead of setting a daily profit target, set performance goals that hold you accountable to the execution of your plan (e.g. 90% or more of all trades taken fit my A+ setup criteria). This way you will shift your focus and measure of success to how well you are sticking to your trading plan. Ultimately that’s what will deliver your long-term results. From a manifestation perspective, you are co-creating your reality with the universe, so actions are required to meet your part of the bargain.  The more strategic and intentional these actions are, the quicker you can expect to see results.

4. PRACTICE GRATITUDE

The present moment holds a lot of power when it comes to both psychology and manifestation. In the midst of working towards manifesting your desires, it’s important to stay mindful and thankful for the good things that are already present in your life. It’s also important to acknowledge even the smallest ways that you are moving towards your goals (or the smallest ways that the universe is delivering on them depending on your belief system).

Keeping a daily gratitude journal is a great way to magnify your awareness of all the love, abundance, prosperity and good fortune that is in your current life. This can be as simple as just writing down 5 things that you are grateful for in a journal each evening. Practicing gratitude in this way has been proven to improve sleep, lower high blood pressure, strengthen the immune system, improve patience and self-confidence and increase resilience, among many other benefits.  It also raises your energetic vibration to that of abundance. Gratitude eclipses any scarcity thinking and trains your mind to stay focused on the idea that your desires are constantly being fulfilled and all your needs met.

5. LET GO OF INTERNAL RESISTANCE AND LIMITING BELIEFS

Your subconscious mind rules 95% of your actions. If your subconscious mind is not aligned with your conscious goals, the result will be self-sabotage. In trading terms, when your conscious goal of *making ALL the money* conflicts with a subconscious limiting belief like “I am not deserving of success” or “all rich people are greedy”,  the result can be destructive trading habits like revenge-trading, over-trading, ignoring stops and loss limits or hesitating to take trades.

To reach your trading potential, become aware of any deeply-held subconscious beliefs that may be tripping you up in your trading. Once you have pinpointed exactly what those beliefs are, then you can use a highly effective mental training tool – Affirmations – to reprogram your subconscious mind for success. While affirmations are a stalwart of the manifestation toolkit, they are also grounded in psychotherapy and self-talk research within performance psychology. You can access a free Affirmation Script for Traders here on my YouTube channel if you want to test it out.

6. VISUALIZE SUCCESS

Visualize the end result you desire as if it’s already in your reality. Want that bank account balance to hit seven figures? Visualize yourself opening up your banking app and seeing the number staring back at you. Hoping to trade from your laptop on a tropical beach in the not-so-distant future? Visualize yourself sipping Mai Tais with your feet in the sand at the end of another successful trading session. 

Within the performance psychology field there is empirical evidence dating back to the 1940s to support the effectiveness of using visualization to achieve higher levels of performance. Neuro-imaging studies have shown that when we visualize, it activates the same neural pathways as if we were experiencing the event in real life. We are, in effect, wiring our brains for success. 

The key to successful visualization is to make the image as vivid as possible in order to elicit a strong emotional response – the same emotions as if we were experiencing the event in real life. From a manifestation perspective, this emotional charge is what raises our vibration to the level that matches the vibration of that which we desire, bringing it into our physical reality.

7. ACT “AS IF”

Take the actions you would take as if your desire was already achieved. Set up a viewing for the 5-bed villa you have on your vision board. Donate 10% of your current trading profits to that cause that is close to your heart. Dress in a shirt and tie for your home trading session as if you were already a professional trader for a prop firm going into the office to trade. These small actions reinforce to both your conscious and subconscious minds that success is imminent and that you have unshakeable belief in your ability to manifest your goals. 

Not only are you raising your vibration in manifestation terms, the increase in confidence in your ability to achieve your goals has many psychological benefits. People with higher self-confidence in their ability to successfully execute a task or achieve a goal persist longer in the face of adversity, take on more challenging tasks and remain more highly motivated even after setbacks than their counterparts with lower confidence.

And if you’re looking for further inspiration to start “acting as if”, the actor Jim Carrey once wrote himself a 10 million dollar cheque well before he was being paid the big bucks. He wrote it out to himself for Acting Services Rendered and dated it Thanksgiving 1995. He carried it around in his wallet for years and just before – you guessed it – Thanksgiving 1995, he found out he was to be paid 10 million dollars for his role in Dumb and Dumber.

If you liked these tips and are looking for more in-depth trading psychology insights to improve your trading, check out my FREE on-demand Masterclass: