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"The Confident Trader "

Confidence overcomes fear. Confidence also overcomes greed because a component of greed is an underlying sense of scarcity. To be confident doesn’t mean that every trade or trading day will be profitable. What it does mean is that when you look to where you want to go, you know that you can figure out a strategy that will get you there. And you know you can execute that strategy in a consistent manner. A successful strategy doesn’t mean anything if you don’t or can’t or won’t employ it.

Theoretically we should be as successful at trading and investing as our trading and investing strategies. Unfortunately the vast majority of traders and investors fall far short of the results of their strategies. They trip over themselves again and again on the way to employing their methods. My work as a trading coach is to enable traders around the world to become as good as their methods.

Confidence need not waver when you have dips and troughs and plateaus in your trading. Confidence is developed when you realize you can correct mistakes and learn from failures. You don’t persist in failing. You learn and move on. You don’t fear repeating the failure either, you simply anticipate correcting it.

Self esteem is basically the sum total of all the thoughts we have about ourselves. This is quite important because we do tend to become what we think about ourselves. The noted philosopher and psychologist, William James, said, “People, in general, become what they think of themselves.” Not only did he say this but he added that this was the essence of all we had learned in psychology in the prior 100 years.

What do you think of yourself as a trader? Do you believe that your dream of excelling as a trader is possible? Do you have a set of philosophies that support your dream? Are you as good as your methods? If not, it’s time to do something about it.

Consider my coaching program. I speak for an hour on the phone each week with the traders I coach. We review your trading, beliefs, attitudes, habits, and philosophies. I help you do more of what works and stop doing what doesn’t work. Through exercises, assignments, and repetitive listening to the CD’s I send, you can become as good as your methods. The money you invest in yourself—especially in difficult times—is truly the best investment you can make. It will pay you exponentially because you never leave yourself. Call me at 800-692-0080, and we’ll discuss it.

Indecision and the Win

kapil dev

Watching cricket (or the same could be applied to baseball for the Americans or football for the Europeans and Brits…and South Americans and…) I have often considered how structured and polished the performances are– clean batting, clean bowling and clean fielding.

When is a risk taker going to be coach? When will some one bring the advantages of risk and a polished team into play?

Indecision must bring opportunities.

Why couldn’t a fielding team (that’s getting flogged or maybe not flogged) start to miss EASY field returns, but have a back up plan–thereby allowing for the batting team to be lured into a second run and capitalise on the often poor communication between batters looking for a run out.

Many other ideas and ways of creating opportunities to take advantage of a situation could be put in play. It seems most areas are not being explored.

Markets certainly don’t have those problems with a muliple of false break outs catching everyone on the hop, and whether we like it or not, keeping the game interesting.

You are Accountable

Traders like to think that they only need to be accountable to themselves in order to get the best out of their trading. But it has been my experience that most traders fail miserably at this task.  So why are traders not able to do this?

They do not want to:

  • Be wrong
  • Admit that they are changing their rules
  • Face up to the fact that they do not have good rules
  • Realize that they need psychological help
  • Realize that they do not have what it takes

If you are committed to doing whatever it takes to follow your rules to reach a higher level of profit, you should consider asking someone to help you with this task if you are not doing a good job of it yourself.

Who could take on the role of a trader’s accountability?

  • A significant other
  • A friend
  • A trading buddy
  • A teacher
  • A coach

What would a person need to help you be more accountable?

  • A clearly defined set of rules from you
  • Your commitment to telling the truth to them
  • An accounting of the trades you took
  • Why you think the trades you took were good opportunities
  • The risk/reward ratios before the trade
  • The money management procedure you followed
  • Whether or not you followed your rules
  • The lessons you learned
  • And at the four month periodical review, the changes you would make and why

Reward or punishment

There should be a clearly defined predetermined punishment or reward that both of you agree upon for not following your rules.  Here are some examples of punishments or rewards to consider.

Punishment

  • No trading the rest of the day
  • Walk around the block before taking the next trade
  • Twenty push ups
  • Limit the size of your trades for the rest of the week

Rewards (more…)

4 Trading Quotes for Today's Trading Session

“You must practice being a successful trader first. From that state of mind you will get information about what to do, and that will produce what you want to have.”

“Excellence is about stepping outside the comfort zone, training with a spirit of endeavor, and accepting the inevitability of trials and tribulations. Progress is built, in effect, upon the foundations of necessary failure.” 

 “Amateurs keep thinking what trades to get into, while professionals spend just as much time figuring out their exits.”

“Confidence doesn’t come from being right all the time: it comes from surviving the many occasions of being wrong.” Brent Steenbarger, The Daily Trading Coach “When you attain some degree of control over yourself, you can then see how other traders are not in control of what happens to them.”

5 Trading Pitfalls and how to Solve Them


Pitfalls
1. Focusing on the P & L

2. Losing objectivity while in a trade

3. Becoming emotional about a trade

4. Lacking confidence: exiting early, failing to put a trade on, not sizing up

5. Difficulty adapting to a changing market

Solutions
1. Quantify success base on the caliber of the trade (i.e. high quality entries/exits).

2. Continuously ask yourself, “is my original reason WHY I entered this trade still there?”

3. While you are in a trade, ask yourself, if I had no position on right now, what would I do? Buy? Sell Short? Do nothing? Then re-evaluate your trade size and direction.

4. Confidence should always come from within. Step#1: Write bullet list of data points proving WHY you are a skilled trader. Step #2: Prime yourself each morning by reading it over to yourself. Could be the most valuable 30 seconds you spend each day.

5. Flip your perspective by keeping track of what is not working (by default this tells you what IS working).

Keep your eye on the ball and your head in the game!

H + W + P = E

Understanding your own trading psychology is critical to being a successful portfolio manager. 
Are you focused on trying to make money? Or are you more focused on trying not to lose money?
The truth is that making money is the easy part. It is keeping it that is so hard.
Statistically, you are going to make money half the time anyway as I have found that discretionary traders make money on approximately 45-55% of their trades. That is not my opinion – that is what the data say.
The difference between being profitable and not profitable or modest and substantial returns is not about the frequency of being “right.” It is about how much do you MAKE when you are right and how much do you LOSE when you are wrong.
Don’t trade to be right. Trade to make money. In order to make money, you have to lose less.
As a trading psychology coach, the formula I use with my clients is as follows:
H + W + P = E
Hoping + Wishing + Praying = EXIT THE TRADE! 

AMAZON’S JEFF BEZOS COMPARES KINDNESS AND CLEVERNESS

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, recently gave the following remarks to the Princeton Class of 2010.  This is another example of how one short speech for a few can become one giant leap for many.

What do I get out of it?  That as a trader, educator, and coach I must not allow my cleverness to get in the way of my kindness and in so doing I will build a great story…a story that will pay dividends for much longer than any equity curve.  The greater question:  What will it do for you?

Enjoy!

Video Version:  Please note that Bezos speech begins about 6 minutes into this recording.

As a kid, I spent my summers with my grandparents on their ranch in Texas. I helped fix windmills, vaccinate cattle, and do other chores. We also watched soap operas every afternoon, especially “Days of our Lives.” My grandparents belonged to a Caravan Club, a group of Airstream trailer owners who travel together around the U.S. and Canada. And every few summers, we’d join the caravan. We’d hitch up the Airstream trailer to my grandfather’s car, and off we’d go, in a line with 300 other Airstream adventurers. I loved and worshipped my grandparents and I really looked forward to these trips. On one particular trip, I was about 10 years old. I was rolling around in the big bench seat in the back of the car. My grandfather was driving. And my grandmother had the passenger seat. She smoked throughout these trips, and I hated the smell.

At that age, I’d take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I’d calculate our gas mileage — figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I’d been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can’t remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I’d come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, “At two minutes per puff, you’ve taken nine years off your life!”

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. “Jeff, you’re so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division.” That’s not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, “Jeff, one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.”

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they’re given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you’re not careful, and if you do, it’ll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

This is a group with many gifts. I’m sure one of your gifts is the gift of a smart and capable brain. I’m confident that’s the case because admission is competitive and if there weren’t some signs that you’re clever, the dean of admission wouldn’t have let you in.

Your smarts will come in handy because you will travel in a land of marvels. We humans — plodding as we are — will astonish ourselves. We’ll invent ways to generate clean energy and a lot of it. Atom by atom, we’ll assemble tiny machines that will enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary but also inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life. In the coming years, we’ll not only synthesize it, but we’ll engineer it to specifications. I believe you’ll even see us understand the human brain. Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Galileo, Newton — all the curious from the ages would have wanted to be alive most of all right now. As a civilization, we will have so many gifts, just as you as individuals have so many individual gifts as you sit before me.

How will you use these gifts? And will you take pride in your gifts or pride in your choices?

I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice. (more…)

Your Own Trading Coach!

 Trading Coach

We can’t control how markets move, so we can’t control whether any single trade we make will be profitable or not. But we can control how we make trades: how we enter, how we size positions, how we exit, and how we contain losses.

Having rules about all of those helps us set specific goals about the process of trading, rather than about the outcome.

The goal of your learning is to trade well, just as the goal of a pitcher is to make a good pitch. If you do that often enough, you’ll win your share of outings.

Focus on Being

The one thing that is at the core of every person’s trading, no matter what tools are utilized, is a human being. The Professional Traders recognize that being is the start of the entire process, who they are as people, as traders. By focusing on yourself first and then on the rest, you address the core of your trading business. Just like every sports team looks up to its coach for direction or like a company looking up to its CEO for direction the results of your trading all begin and end with you as you are the captain of your own ship. It is you, the human being, making all the decisions about trading like what to trade, when to trade, what resources to use, what strategy to use, the knowledge you will acquire, who to listen to and so on. Professional Traders develop and maintain a very high quality of being. Being is more important than doing. If you are fatigued or stressed, your judgment can be impaired. If you are naive or ignorant you are more likely going to make mistakes. If you are anxious or scared you will not be able to think clearly as you would when relaxed. If you are emotional in trading you will see losses in your account. No matter what you do if you are not at 100% of what you should be you will not the results you wish for. (more…)

I Promise I Will Never Do That Again!

Have you ever experienced doing well for a period of time and then something just snaps and you end up losing a significant amount of money? It happens in a variety of ways and for different reasons, but what typically follows is a self beating-up process, and/or a promise that you will never do THAT again!

Sound familiar? It’s a very common phenomenon.

Unfortunately, the promise you make to yourself typically gets broken again…and again…..and again.  As the pattern continues, the potential for more psychological damage becomes very real.

Over many years as a clinical psychologist people have come to me who are struggling with repetitive problem behaviors. Many of them previously tried various forms of ‘willpower’ without any long-lasting success.

As a trading psychology coach and consultant I can tell you that most traders see the solution as an act of willpower or “trying harder next time”. But I have news for you.  Although willpower is certainly necessary to be a good trader, it alone will not break a deeply rooted problematic pattern. If it was simply a matter of  ‘doing it differently next time’, then many traders would of already done that and the pattern would never appear again.

So, how does one break the pattern? I suggest that the ‘promise’ you make to yourself is not only about willpower, but also a promise to learn about what makes you tick, such as your emotions and your sub-conscious process.

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