There is the famous old adage that as a trader you should cut your losses short and let your winners run. 

The best are able to do this. 

BUT it’s a very easy thing to intellectualise and yet quite another thing to execute in the real world.  After all if it was so easy there wouldn’t be all the writers, books, blogs, tweets, coaches, mentors etc in the trading world.  They would be obsolete.

HOWEVER IT ALSO APPLIES TO LIFE AWAY FROM THE CHARTS.

The ego and subconscious are often key adversaries to us gaining flow in our lives and achieving abundance.  This is true in both trading and normal life.

If you are unwilling to accept you are wrong and move on it is all too easy to not keep your losses small.   

In real life if you are not willing to use an emotional stop point you can also let situations run far further than ideal for your happiness.

Take as an example a bad situation with a friend or family member that has happened in the past where neither is willing to accept that they are wrong.  At a certain point it’s often best to just take your loss.  Accept that what occurred occurred and that you are 100% the source of your own reality.  Draw a line in the sand and start afresh.

The great thing in life is that if we accept that we are completely and utterly responsible for everything that happens to us we have a new opportunity every minute to begin again.  To put another trade on and get in line with the major trend.

Just like with trading sometimes you need to put several trades on that hit your emotional stop, take the hit, learn from it – and re-enter.  The more comfortable you become with not having to be right the more that things start to flow and the more happiness you create.

Of course sometimes you have to have a more significant stop in place like a max-loss stop emotionally as well.  If you have in good faith taken your emotional stop, re-entered and the other person is so heavily invested in their position sometimes it’s best to stop taking the losses.  

Realise that you don’t always have to be in the market; that being in cash is an option.  You can do this and spend the time building your emotional capital and in the future have an attempt at trading that troubling market again (if you must or you can simply look for a new market to trade).  You will have improved in that ‘cash’ period and perhaps the market conditions will have also changed when you chose to re-enter.

These are of course just my musings but they seem to be in line with what many others find. 

Trading the markets of life and trading the financial markets are not always so distantly removed from each other.  In fact I posit they are very closely related.

It all starts with getting rid of the need to be right and thus unable to accept your ability to get things wrong, learning all the time and accepting complete responsibility for where you are in life.