I recently heard from a trader who told me he has been having problems with discipline in his day trading. He knows how to trade, he knows the setups he needs to be looking for in the charts, when to enter, and when to exit. His trouble is in having the discipline to wait for only those setups and not to take half baked trades in the meantime.

This is a very common problem for traders, I imagine everyone goes through it at some stage in their career. In working with student traders over the years, I have noticed a phenomenon that I think explains one of the reasons for this lack of discipline. When I watch student traders trade, they tend to sit very patiently and explain to me what they are seeing on the chart in front of them. When they see a valid setup come along, they can quite happily tell me what the setup is and how they plan to trade it, and subsequently they will execute the trade accordingly. When the same student is trading alone, they start taking all sorts of off-plan trades, setups that aren