If you think about money, it’s emotionally charged. So if you make some money, you would feel great but if you would lose money, you’d feel bad. If someone steals money from you or you get ripped off, you feel sad and angry. We all have this emotion. We also have all the baggage in the past that money things have happened to us. And we have all the fear and greed about these things happening again.

Those emotions drive most people’s decisions when it comes to money investing. And this is why most people don’t get ahead because emotion up means intelligence down. Why? Because it’s a fight or flight response. The sabre-tooth tiger attacks the caveman; stress increases, blood diverts from the brain to the body, and cortisol is released. So, we get ready to fight or run and survive.

But in the modern world, that doesn’t work for us. We still have the same stress response, the same response to the emotion, but there’s no sabre tooth tiger to run from. There’s only the stock market going up and down, the fear about the real estate deal, someone stealing a hundred bucks from me, and that emotion kills your financial freedom.

So the point is you’ve got to bypass human emotions if you want to be successful as any investor. You do that by having a system or a set of rules or processes that you repeatedly follow so that you know what you’ve got to do regardless of what’s going on up here. This is why you trade your system, not your emotions.

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Adrian Reid Founder and CEO
Adrian is a full-time private trader based in Australia and also the Founder and Trading Coach at Enlightened Stock Trading, which focuses on educating and supporting traders on their journey to profitable systems trading. Following his successful adoption of systematic trading which generated him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year using just 30 minutes a day to manage his system trading workflow, Adrian made the easy decision to leave his professional work in the corporate world in 2012. Adrian trades long/short across US, Australian and international stock markets and the cryptocurrency markets. His trading systems are now fully automated and have consistently outperformed international share markets with dramatically reduced risk over the past 20+ years. Adrian focuses on building portfolios of profitable, stable and robust long term trading systems to beat market returns with high risk adjusted returns. Adrian teaches traders from all over the world how to get profitable, confident and consistent by trading systematically and backtesting their own trading systems. He helps profitable traders grow and smooth returns by implementing a portfolio of trading systems to make money from different markets and market conditions.