The Mental Strategies of Top Traders; The Psychological Determinants of Trading Success
Archives of “February 2019” month
rssDiscipline-Risk Management-Passion
DISCIPLINE: The trader must have the ability to control themselves and follow a plan. Discipline is a required skill in trading without it there is no edge, you are either a gambler or simply trading off fear and greed. You will not be successful, instead you will be gamed by those in control of their emotions.
RISK MANAGEMENT: Risk management must be a top skill for a trader to even survive in the markets. You must structure your risk per trade to be no more than risking 1% or 2% of your trading capital. You have to be able to survive 10 losses in a row. These strings of losses come around more often than a new trader would suspect. If you lose just 5% of your trading capital in each of ten trades you will be down almost 50% and need a 100% return just to get back to even. At this point you are ruined.
PASSION: A trader must love to trade, without a passion for the markets and trading the new trader will not survive the learning process because anyone with common sense would believe that it was not worth the struggle. Passion will be needed to bring a trader through the learning curve and later the losing streak.
10 Thoughts for Traders
- Managing your risk, you will not be around to win if you do not control your risk per trade. How many losses in a row can you survive? Surviving the market is magic at times.
- Trading a consistent methodology is magical because you will be consistent enough to make money when a market environment rolls around that it works in, single trades by themselves mean nothing outside the context of a method.
- Trading a methodology you believe in will enable you to trade it through draw downs instead of giving up.
- Understanding your edge will enable you to have the mental toughness to trade knowing eventually you will get the pay off.
- Trading price action versus your own opinion will help you magically be on the side of the majority most the time.
- Trading in the direction of the trend will enable you to be right more times than wrong most of the time.
- Cutting losses short and letting winners run will make you profitable. Now that is the magic of asymmetry.
- Only trading in markets and trading vehicles you understand will keep you safe from many big mistakes.
- Doing nothing when you do not know what to do is a plan that will save you much money.
- Spending thousands of hours studying charts, reading books from successful traders, and doing the right homework will make you successful eventually so all your friends can tell yo how lucky you are. Then you can tell them that is isn’t magic, trading is a lot of hard work.
Buy the dip, buy the dip, then one day…that might not work
The true players of the stock market game.
How To Decide Faster
Think About It
Winners are those with the best ideas. Small ideas are worth a small sum, and big ideas are priceless. Ideas that make money cost money and the most valuable rewards go to ideas with the most value. The age of the big thinker is now. It is an era where profits go to the prophets:
• Big thinkers are on fire.
• Big thinkers never lose in their imaginations.
• Big thinkers bet the farm.
• Big thinkers marinate in thought.
• Big thinkers think better together.
• Big thinkers don’t take no for an answer.
• Big thinkers turn reality into fantasy.
• Big thinkers live their lives with purpose.
• Big thinkers think with their hearts.
29 One Liner Trading Rules
- Take no trades without establishing a complete and precise trading plan before the initial trigger.
- Keep an open mind for new market scenarios based on what the price action and pattern setups provide.
- Always trade with the trend.
- Once I am in a trade, stick with the original plan for target and stop-loss – Don’t panic!
- Make every trade meet the strategy requirements and what happens from there is up to the market.
- I need to exercise greater patience in both buying and selling.
- Be more willing to take a position, even if it is very small. It is tough though to gain the confidence to do so as the market has been tough. (more…)
You can be right & still have bad timing.
10 Trading Rules
Always wait for the setup: no setup – no trade. Agree. If your strategy doesn’t provide you a good risk/reward trade to make, then your job is to be patient until it does. Ironically, this often requires you to sit out some very good moves in the market and be inactive at the very same times you want to be aggressive.- The best trades work almost right away. Agree, but with one important caveat – this rule greatly depends upon your strategy. Some strategies will require greater patience than others. If trading short-term, this rule is almost always correct, but if your time frames are longer, then you also have time on your side which requires more patience but that patience can pay off if your analysis is correct.
- Never take a big loss. If it doesn’t ‘feel’ right. Remove it! Disagree. Sometimes you have to take a big loss to prevent the risk of an even greater loss. Refusing to take a big loss when a mistake has been made can be very costly. I also disagree with the view that “If it doesn’t feel right, remove it.” Actually, some of the best trades you will ever make in your career are those trades that feel wrong and about as far from “right” as you can make it. Don’t believe me? Think over the last month or so about the trades you missed because they didn’t feel right but your strategy told you to hold or buy them anyway! It is also interesting to me that this rule says to trade by feel and at the same time advises in another rule not to trade by emotion. You can’t do one without the other!
- Always perfect your craft and sharpen your skills – good traders are constantly learning. Agree. No matter how skilled, intelligent, and successful you have been, there is always room for improvement. Moreover, because of the ever-growing changing nature of the market, what you do now to trade successfully won’t always work in every situation and the next market environment. Only experience and constant dedication to your job will provide you with the weapons for enduring market success.
- Be patient with winning trades – impatient with trades that fight back. Agree. Another good ways of saying – let your winners run and cut your losers short. The truth is that most individual traders and investors do the exact opposite – they sell winners too quickly and they hold losers far too long letting trades that went awry become long-term “trapped” investments. (more…)
