Let's start the topic all over again. It could very well be that we all agree on everything, but get lost in semantics and terms.
Are we saying that we need a psychologist because we want to hurt ourselves and therefore make the wrong trades by self-sabotage? Because from my experience that is usually NOT the case. Self-sabotage is usually the wrong explanation for unprofitability, which is simply caused by not having a profitable method.
Psychology instead could be helpful in finding out WHY many of us are trading when we do not have a profitable method (and never had one).
My personal experience has been that I thought I needed to work on psychology because I thought I knew what was right and just didn't do it out of self-sabotage. But I was wrong. I was flattering myself by calling myself a "masochist" - I simply didn't have a profitable method.
I did not know what method was profitable, and therefore I lost simply because I was not sure about what worked (what entry, what stoploss, what takeprofit). Now that I know what works, the only psychology needed is in letting my automated trading system run. The same should apply to a discretionary trader who knows what method works - he should follow it, plain and simple. However with discretionary trading it does get more complicated because by definition it is "discretionary", and discretion means:
"the power or right to decide or act according to one's own judgment"
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/discretion
And when our judgement changes also our trading could change and stop being profitable. We should differentiate between these 3 groups of traders:
1) discretionary traders that were never consistently profitable for long periods of time (months) but who somehow, erroneously, think that it's due to psychological problems - it's wrong, you don't need a psychologist, as you're not profitable because you did not come up with a profitable method. You need to work harder on finding a profitable method.
2) discretionary traders that have been consistently profitable for long periods of time (months) and have stopped being profitable for psychological reasons (obviously, since their method worked). In this case the cause may be psychological (unless your method stopped working).
3) automated traders who have a profitable automated system and are not letting it run or are interfering with it - then you do need a psychologist. However it is unlikely, because even for an unstable guy like me it's very hard to not let your system run once you find out that the system makes money, whereas you lose money every time you trade discretionary.
