Worst enemy of trader?

By | October 8, 2015 4:04 pm

The Bitter truth abut trading enemy is:  You are your own worst enemy in trading, as its you who make the one making decisions and your emotions are usually getting in the way and you are your own worst enemy.

If you’re a trading junkie, you’re going to be reading a lot of books, taking a lot of courses and seminars and you’re going to learn a lot of the technical side of things, and when I say ‘technical’, I’m talking about technical analysis, but not just technical analysis, I’m talking about other technical aspects of learning something.  In the end, you’re going to constantly end up shooting yourself in the foot because you are your own worst enemy and you haven’t learned to master your own trading psychology, yet.

In layman language trading psychology means  knowing when to quit and when to push.  That’s a big part of it.  Sometimes the markets are just not good to trade. You should not be trading in the stock market if the markets are in a very bad mood and you’re just not able to handle it.  Other times, you need to know when to push.  If you’re doing extremely well and you need to use more leverage, you really need to stack on to trades and so forth, that’s part of the psychology aspects of trading.

Taking your stop losses: If I still need to tell you that you should have stop losses. Then clearly you haven’t been listening to anything I’ve ever said.  If you’re not using stop losses, then please give your head a shake ‘cause you know you should know better.  That’s all I’m going to say about stop losses.

Hitting your targets: It’s usually a pretty good idea to have a good target price in mind.  If you’ve got a target price and when it actually does hit your target, you don’t actually buy or sell, whatever the case may be, then that’s a psychological issue you need to address because clearly, you’re not following your rules.

Controlling greed, fear and hope: We all have these things.  They’re inside of us all the time, especially when we’re in a trade, these emotions are constantly tugging at you, trying to make you make bad decisions.  If I was to tell you that greed, fear and hope was a huge part of trading, it would be a huge understatement.

The last point here is ‘Discipline, discipline, discipline’.  I am extremely lazy when it comes to trading.  I don’t want to be stuck in front of the computer all day long.  I don’t want to be scanning the markets for hours on end trying to find opportunities, so I try to make it as easy as possible.  But the simple truth is, if you want to be successful in trading, if this is more than a hobby for you, then you’re going to need to develop some serious discipline so that you can do the things and continue to do the things that you need to do to be successful.  It’s going to take some work – oh, the dreaded ‘work’ word – but I keep it at a minimal amount of work, for sure, and discipline is huge part of that.

One thought on “Worst enemy of trader?

  1. RAJMOHAN

    THANKS MASTER FOR YOUR REGULAR DOSE OF TRADING ENERGY-TONIC.

    With ref to last para of aricle, I wish to say, passionate traders never get bored in front of system. Passion will bring discipline to continue in business.

    Reply

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