Everyone has them. It's what distinguishes us as humans. We may not want to admit it, but we all have attitudes that can and do impact our decisions for investing in stocks. These self emotions can include: veneration, terror, greed, arrogance, happiness, unhappiness, love, infatuation, and egotism. These emotions usually do a lot of damage to your investment strategy. At least with regard to investing, we would all be better served if we could remove these emotions from our psyche.

So how do we go about removing emotion from investing and learning to controlling our emotions? No person can completely shut off these emotions. They are a part of our nature. Emotions make up our personality. However, you can learn to keep these emotions from adversely impacting your investment strategy. By doing so, you can become a smarter stock market investor and not be continually buffeted by emotional ups and downs. Let's study how two emotions, greed and arrogance, can change our investment trading decisions.

When greed manifests itself, it becomes an all - consuming, propelling force. You may no longer contain the appropriate time to psychoanalyze your determinations. All of a sudden, you feel you are no more trusting your investment rules. All you can think about is stock tips and easy profit — big profits. Anything else isn't fulfilling.

Errors in judgment are the result of the momentum of greed. Mistakes will be made. You set yourself up for failure when all you can think about is making an enormously huge fortune. You proabably are not doing a good job of following your disciplined investment strategy. The odds dramatically increase that you will achieve consistent losses instead of consistent profits without a disciplined investment strategy.

Let's consider what happens when arrogance rears its ugly head. It is a serious matter to be cheerful with your portfolio's results. But when happiness turns into arrogance, consistency in making profits becomes a thing of the past. It is actually very easy to let arrogance inherit your intelligence. If you have a few weeks of consistent profits, you might say, "I haven't picked a bad stock yet. I might be a stock picking genius!”

Along the way, you begin to tire of following a disciplined approach to investing. You may begin making minor faults. Instead of sticking with your rules, you might start chasing your suspicions.

Hunch trading is almost the worst way to trade stocks and it is one the best ways to lose money. Some of these mistakes may actually make you even more money. (Almost every investor, in a bull market, becomes a stock-picking genius.)

When your arrogance overwhelms your common sense, you begin to set yourself up for potentially significant losses. Why? Because you simply threw away your rules for investing and now rely on your "intuition.” Intuition is not a good investment strategy and will eventually lead to disaster. Don't let your successes cloud your judgment. Remain modest. Make sure to stay smart. Stay disciplined!

Any emotion that might cause you to make poor investment decisions will absolutely be eliminated if you agree to let a commonsense set of rules govern your trading actions to the extent that you trade only by these rules.

When you always invest in the stock market, it helps to do so in a calm, rational frame of mind. Try to remove emotion from investing. Allow the rules to make the decisions for you, and you will no longer be riding the roller coaster of emotion. Try letting your investing rules rule.