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Control Your Emotion or Other People Will Control You

  
  Education
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Many people are controlled by fear. Fear of losing an opportunity causes you to act in haste. Fear of losing your paper profit causes you to sell out too early. And fear of losing everything causes you to sell right at the bottom. Although selling right at the bottom is caused more by frustration than anything else, fear also plays a part. How do we overcome these kind of fears? Knowledge is the best weapon. When you know, people cannot scare, frighten or intimidate you. They can’t con you in anyway. Knowledge is your first key to success.
Hope causes you to hold on to a falling stock. Sometimes your hope is rewarded; your stock turns around and you make a profit. Unfortunately, hope often becomes hopeless. Experience tells me that it is much better to keep an uptrend stock and let go a falling one. This strategy is vital, simply because a trend in motion is likely to continue. Hope also causes people to buy into excessively high PE stocks. I prefer what is good today and better tomorrow.  (more…)

Trading On Fear & Panic

  
  Education
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Fear-Panic

First, no matter what, as a trader it is your #1 job never to put yourself in a “panic” position. No trade, no matter what you think of its future potential, outweighs that rule. If you trade for a living, your goal is always to “live to trade another day” which means tight risk management and taking every step to avoid this situation.

On every trade I make, I know where I have to exit no matter what before I make the trade. If I can’t figure that out, then I don’t make the trade. I learned, like you are right now, that trying to figure out an exit after you’re down significantly in a position never is to your advantage. Right now, you’re emotionally connected to that trade, if not trapped by it. (more…)

Patience

  
  Education

The most difficult thing for traders to do is to sit there and wait. Why? Because, we live in a world that is on a total dopamine, hypomanic binge. This is never more clearly manifest than by those who absolutely have to be in the markets at all times, desperately need to be trading and simply cannot wait. They are human do-ings, rather than human be-ings.

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There is a wonderful advantage to waiting for the right entry and exit points. This allows you to be in a market- neutral mindset, and frees you from looking frantically for bearish or bullish views to justify your biases. Granted, you are not making money, but you are also (and much more importantly) not losing it. You are preserving capital. You can take time to reflect study, hone and refine your trading plan, adopt some healthy exercise and dietary habits, and become a stronger and more centered person. Simply waiting without stress for the right opportunity allows you to become a more rational and impartial observer.

Patience frees you from active involvement in the chaotic, and often reckless, behavior of others in the markets, and it puts you and your trading plan into a clearer perspective. It allows you to see yourself as a human be-ing, rather than a human do-ing.

When you first started trading, what did you hear constantly? Preserve your capital. You heard it, but maybe you did not listen, or did not understand. If you have no financial capital to use, you are out of the game. If you are chasing or getting in just to get in and are getting whipsawed daily; and you are losing, drip by drip, or in larger chunks, you are out of the game. If you are cutting your winners too quickly and letting your losers ride, you are out of the game.

If you wait, take time, assess the situation and then pounce like a jaguar at the right opportunity, your chances for trader longevity increase significantly. You have preserved your financial capital, and deployed it appropriately with a good risk/reward ratio.

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