In all my years of trading and talking to fellow traders, I have noticed that retails traders suffer from mostly 3 mental blind spot which affects there trading .Hopefully, after reading this, you will be able to see them coming and stop them before they destroy your account.
Being Undisciplined and Uneducated
A trader who lacks discipline can never make a successful trader. Most of retail traders are not having proper education and on the top of that not having discipline a sure shot recipe to blow.
The main culprits are what I like to call ‘System Jumpers’. These are traders that are constantly tweaking and changing their trading methods. These traders do not realize that learning to trade a system efficiently takes time.
System Jumpers are traders who lack the discipline to stick to, and learn how to trade, a system. They try it for a week and when it doesn’t work they jump to the next system or method.
Need to be Right on each trade
Typical Story of Retail trader . Traders opens his platform and enters a long trade as he saw someone saying today market should be bullish. He targets 30 Points target with a 15 points SL in NIfty Future. The trade goes against him immediately.
It goes down, first five points, then ten points, and then 15 points. When it reaches 15 points, trader decides he doesn’t want to lose another trade and moves his stop loss down.
The price keeps falling and trader continues to move his stop.
Eventually trader closes out his trade and he has lost a huge portion of his account.
Most of traders are not able to accept that they are on the wrong side of a trade. They keep pushing the stop down in the hope that it would eventually turn around. The need to be right is an account killer.
The Desire to be Rich
The desire to be rich manifests itself in many ways. If you think about it, the majority of the issues that newbies have, such as overtrading or poor money management, stem from the desire to be rich.
Trading will not make you rich in the short term. It will likely take years before you’re trading well enough to leave your day job. If you started trading last week and you plan to quit your job in six months, because you anticipate being rich enough to trader for a living , you are living in a fool’s paradise
@ashwinkumar… well said. (do not trade every day may be changed to ” trade only on trending days and do not trade on other days”
You can never time the trade.. each and every trending days cannot be caught ..
@ rkapoor21212 : Here are few things I have learnt from my trading experience after 4 years,
1) Do not trade every day.
2) Do not re-enter market after making a profit or loss once.
3) Do not trade without stop loss.
4) Plan your trade and trade your plan with proper stop loss.
5) Build your wealth slowly and steadily.
6) Wait for opportunities and let your profits run for long.
7) Accept your loss and do not trade again to compensate it.
8) Do your own analysis before entering market.
9) Even the best can loose money in the market.
@Bramesh : I know the question was for you but I just answered 🙂 Hope it’s OK.
Thanks for sharing valuable inputs very much appreciated..
I enjoy the testimony of this article but in the kind of market these days, one goes wrong both ways, its always either selling the future too soon or selling it too early. I hope you get what I mean to say.
I have another question, how true is “history repeats itself” in the current scenario of stock market.
Is it mandatory to trade everyday ? If you are not comfortable with market condition stay out..
Price have memory and they keep repeating it again and again..
Sir, how about tweaking an existing trading method to improve its performance for different types of markets. Is it also called indiscipline.
Backtesting will only give the right answer.. Practices Practices till you becomes an expert..