Catching up; checking in with 'fear'

its been a few days:

• the 'SHOE July Pre OE' long model was closed on Monday at 4pm, and generated a loss of about 1.7%...
• still stressed about the systemic swing trading models being out of sync with the market...i know there is nothing i can do about it and that is helping a bit...still its been nice not having any open systemic positions the past few days...i needed a break from the 'uncertainty associated with an open position'...
• doing some joint development work with JE on an ES intraday trading model (http://myestradingjournal.blogspot.com/) ...some concepts appear robust and limited testing bears that out...continued refinement of additional concepts and then more involved testing...working with JE has been a great experience in and of itself...
• discretionary daytrading at vcm (http://www.vcmtrading.com/#) has been going pretty well since the beginning of last week...i have been focusing on trading opening gappers...so far the results have been good...the things i am most proud of are cutting my losers short and taking the small loss, as well as exiting a trade that wasn't moving in the direction i was anticipating after a reasonable period of time...i still need to work on letting my winners run some more...over the past 8 trading days, the dollar value of the biggest winner has been greater than the dollar value of the biggest loser, so this is step in the right direction...but perhaps the bigger thing is to decide if i am going to R base the opening gap plays or scalp them....so far its been a blend of both: start a small position with a known profit target, add to that position when certain setups occur, and then calculate the R based stop...even had a good back and forth chat room exchange this am with the chat room moderator (trading/teaching master to the nth degree), who helped clarify my thinking about certain concepts...
• from this weekend's quiz (http://stbsmb.blogspot.com/2009/07/quiz.html) : when the average trader makes a decision to enter or exit a position, one of two emotions is probably dominant in the traders decision making process...what are the two emotions that the average trader might be keying off of? JE had a funny response...the insight i had this weekend is the two emotions are not the usual fear and greed pairing, but rather 'fear of losing' and 'fear of missing'...'fear of losing' leads to them selling into a down market, 'fear of missing' lead to them buying into an up market...when these traders act on either of these emotions, it tends to drive the market further in the direction of the current trend...i believe this is what is playing out now...the shorts have been madly covering over the past week on the failed head shoulders pattern in the S&P 500...under invested longs are scrambling to get more upside exposure and continue to drive the NASDAQ 100 to new swing highs...'fear of losing' and 'fear of missing'...
• can it be that 'fear' is the driving force in the market?? leading to under performance for the trading novice and to out performance for the trading master?? i am aware that fear plays a role in my trading performance, but perhaps i have underestimated its influence...
• is mastering fear one of the requirements to achieving trading mastery?