a bit more junk
Axioms are fun but useless until you learn them through your own experience
No matter where you go... there you are. Doesn't have anything to do with trading, you say? Think again, and think hard. If you are going to trade so that you can run away from your life or yourself, you are still going to find yourself right there next to you when you are trading, living that same old life. Successful or not, you will not be happy, because YOU will still be there. If you need to fix something, then fix it -- don't trade instead. If you want to trade, then trade.
If 90% of traders are losing money, and those traders have common beliefs with respect to the mechanics and approaches to trading, then to adopt those common beliefs for yourself is to make the conscious decision to be a loser.
Greed will make you poor.
If you experience an overwhelming emotional urge to take a trade because you are sure to make a killing this time, then you are experiencing greed.
Impatience will make you poor.
If you experience an overwhelming emotional urge to take a trade because you are sure that you are missing out on the perfect trading opportunity, then you are experiencing impatience.
A small sequence of consecutive winning trades is often all it takes to delude yourself into thinking that you have found a system that is guaranteed to make you rich
Never sneer at a losing trader. You are never safe enough from losses of your own to justify that kind of behavior.
Learn to trade before you trade. If you lose without understanding why, then how can you avoid future losses? If you win by accident, then how will you create a consistent winning strategy?
For new traders, first and foremost, have some system or method to define entry and exit. Eliminate judgement when you start out by having clear-cut rules and exact prices. Don't jump from idea to idea and trade impulsively.
In gambling, changing methods is known as "the switches". Your method starts losing, so you switch to another, which immediately starts losing. By switching, you open the door to getting the worst results from each method and none of the good, and the overall result can be much worse than even the worst system followed faithfully.
If you think you may be a good intuitive trader, one of the rare individuals who has a natural "feel" for when to act, and if you find it hard to quantify and write rules: test yourself in real-time until you're sure it's real.
You've got to know that the next 100 trades will have X% losers. They are inevitable. They're just part of the picture, not a cause for despair. Before entering each trade, visualize it losing, and visualize it winning, because either may happen. Don't root for it like an underdog, just observe it and act accordingly. NOTHING ever makes THIS trade more certain than any other. |
