I am assuming that the primary purpose behind starting this thread is to see if meditation would help with trading or not.
I ask you this first. If I tell you that in order to build your biceps you should purchase a 2000 page encyclopedia and carry it around every day and read it, would you do it? Sure, carrying back and forth a tome that heavy would exercise your biceps and you may gain an inch or more, depending on your body type and other factors, but is that really the best (or even a good) way to try and build your biceps? And isn't reading an encyclopedia meant to be rewarding in a different way?
The same applies to meditation. You do not do meditation for 'peace' and 'calm' (that can particularly be summoned to assist your trading endeavors). 'Peace' and 'calm' are just incidental, and just happen when you do meditation. Just like you see your biceps growing as you spend more days lugging around your encyclopedia. Any worthy system of meditation would give in return something far deeper (and would in turn place monumental demands on you, then but that's a topic for another day). That something deeper once attained could even call you to question the very exercise of indulging in a zero sum game like trading. So, be doubly careful !
So the question is what could one do to attain more favorable mindset that would increase the odds of trading success. By all means include meditation to your routine. But there's a lot more that can be done IMO that could be more immediate and direct.
On the physical activity side, aerobic exercise is known to have near miraculous and immediate positive effects on both body and mind, so that's certainly worth considering. For me, it has been a panacea really.
On the mental side of things, someone mentioned contemplation, and I can whole-heartedly recommend it. Just be sure to understand properly what it means, as there are a hundred different variants of it, and a lot of them peddle contemplation as some flavor of meditation itself (not that there's anything wrong with it per se). The contemplation I am talking about is of the Stoic variety, but not quite. Think of it as a form of self-analysis, or self-psychotherapy if you like, wherein you honestly and ruthlessly study, question, challenge, reflect on, analyze, and pick apart into pieces your emotions, thoughts, actions, their source(s) and their consequence(s). Play with it on a daily basis and see where it leads. To help with this, you can read some Stoic philosophers. There are also some excellent Psychotherapy books and case studies available that could help. This was quite a journey for me.
Be warned though that all if this, including meditation, can and often does, bring up some problematic emotional issues to the fore, and therefore it is not recommended that you do all this on your own. Seek the help of a qualified mental health professional if you intend going down this road.
I say all this as someone who has pursued the path of meditation for 10+ years now (which has also taken me down the other roads I mention above). It's been an interesting journey, and I recommend meditation to all, but don't go around doing it to just get a 'trading in the zone' mindset. If you want to get a 'trading in the zone' mindset just practice 'trading in the zone' mindset while trading. Possibly some of the more direct things mentioned above might help as well. Just don't go around reading an encyclopedia to build your biceps.
