There is a book by Josh Lukeman called The Market Maker's Edge. Get this book and read the first 4 chapters until you can quote them from memory. The first time you violate any of the risk and trade management guidelines in that book, quit trading and repeat those chapters out loud 10 times before trying again.
As for T/A and charts, be sure you fully understand support, resistance, price, and volume. Stochastics can help provide confirmation of pending reversals. Everything else is secondary.
I've posted the following on ET before and you should really come to understand it:
Support and resistance levels within your trading time frame tell you where the majority of traders or investors wished they'd gotten in or out of a position. Support is that price level where people wish they'd gotten in before and they pile in now. For a great example of this, take a look at Friday's chart and the 1-year chart for POT. As POT hit new lows Friday morning, it was about to test its March 19th low, a very strong support level. You would expect a strong bounce off anything in the 143-146 range and once this reversal occurred you would expect everyone who wished they had enjoyed that nearly $100/share run up between March and June to pile in big time. Sure enough as soon as the stock dropped below 146 and reversed nothing could hold it back for the rest of the day.
Resistance is that price level where those who piled in at the high end of the last uptrend and got burned desperately want to get out at least at break even. If a stock tests a high (intraday, short term, or long term) a second time and fails to make a new high, it has a strong tendency to pull back sharply. When there's a breakout above a previous resistance level, buy stops are triggered and a short squeeze ensues. This causes prospective buyers to fear the stock price will run away from them and they pile in at that point, causing further panic short covering as the stock reaches new highs. As a trader, you can use stochastic indicators to identify a serious overbought condition when this happens and take advantage of shorting the next pullback, which is very common once the short covering is over.
When a support level is broken, stops get triggered and prospective buyers generally wait for the stock to test the next support level to pile in. That's why so many traders short stocks that have broken through support levels, and cover at the next support level. Stochastic indicators can also help you identify these extremely oversold conditions, so you can go long for the bounce off support.
The mental toughness you need as a trader is the patience to wait for strong setups based on S/R levels, improving your probability of success, rather than the desire to "make something happen" where action is unwarranted.
The other mental toughness you need is the ability to cut losses based on an advance plan WITHOUT HESITATION.
