The Desire
If you are trading just for the money you will quit before you are successful, Why? Anyone without a love for the game will quit during the long difficult learning process. After hundreds of hours of work and years of trading with nothing but a loss to show for all the effort anyone with common sense will think it is too hard and just quit. Those with a love and passion for trading will eventually succeed and usually make six figures or become a millionaire for their efforts. Those that do a cost benefit analysis in the first few years will generally quit due to the math.
The Skill
A trader must have the skill to trade in three dimensions. The management of the mind, the method, and money management are all crucial for success. Traders must have the discipline and perseverance to trade robust systems through different market environments without giving up. They must have the ability to accept and deal with their thoughts and emotions as they arise during both winning and losing streaks. Risk must be managed on every single trade without the ego causing bets so big that they put your future trading at risk. The trader must also have the skill to not let fear take away the traders ability to pull the trigger on a good entry.
Archives of “discipline” tag
rssHallmark of a Position Day Trader
6 Random Thoughts
1) Everyone needs a “mental break” from trading once in a while. The best time to take one is during corrective markets. It helps you protect capital and confidence.
2) If you have a -50% loss, it takes a +100% gain to get it back. In other words, CUT YOUR LOSSES!
3) If you have trouble with discipline and staying away from the market, turn off your computer and get out of your chair. If you sit in the barbershop long enough, you’ll eventually get a haircut.
4) The “fear of missing out” is the downfall of most traders.
5) Whoever said that money doesn’t buy happiness clearly didn’t know where to shop.
6) “There is nothing new on Wall Street. What has happened in the past will happen again and again and again. This is because human nature does not change, and it is human emotion that always gets in the way of human intelligence. Of this I am sure.” — Jesse Livermore
40 Rules for Traders
| 1. Trading is simple, but it is not easy. 2. When you get into a trade watch for the signs that you might be wrong. 3. Trading should be boring. 4. Amateur traders turn into professional traders once they stop looking for the “next great indicator.” 5. You are trading other traders, not stocks or futures contracts. 6. Be very aware of your own emotions. 7. Watch yourself for too much excitement. 8. Don’t overtrade. 9. If you come into trading with the idea of making big money you are doomed. 10. Don’t focus on the money. 11. Do not impose your will on the market. 12. The best way to minimize risk is to not trade when it is not time to trade. 13. There is no need to trade five days a week. 14. Refuse to damage your capital. 15. Stay relaxed. 16. Never let a day trade turn into an overnight trade.17. Keep winners as long as they are moving your way. 18. Don’t overweight your trades. 19. There is no logical reason to hesitate in taking a stop. 20. Professional traders take losses because they trust themselves to do what is right. 21. Once you take a loss, forget about it and move on. 22. Find out what loss parameters work best for your setup and adjust them accordingly. 23. Get a feel for market direction by “drilling down” (looking at multiple time frames). 24. Develop confidence by knowing and executing your trade setups the same way every time. 25. Don’t be ridiculous and stupid by adding to losers. 26. Try to enter a full size position right away. 27. Ring the register and scale out of your position. 28. Adrenaline is a sign that your ego and your emotions have reached a point where they are clouding your judgment. 29. You want to own the stock before it breaks out and sell when amateurs are getting in after the move. 30. Embracing your opinion leads to financial ruin. 31. Discipline is not learned until you wipe out a trading account. 32. Siphon off your trading profits each month and stick them in a money market account. 33. Professional traders risk a small amount of money on their equity on one trade. 34. Professional traders focus on limiting risk and protecting capital. 35. In the financial markets heroes get crushed. 36. Stick to your trading rules and you will never blow up your trading account. 37. The market can reinforce bad habits. 38. Take personal responsibility for each trade. 39. Amateur traders think about how much money they can make on each trade. Professional traders think about how much money they can lose. 40. At some point all traders realize that no one can tell them exactly what is going to happen next in the market. |
Wisdom From Bruce Kovner
On protecting emotional equilibrium:
To this day, when something happens to disturb my emotional equilibrium and my sense of what the world is like, I close out all positions related to that event.
On the first rule of trading:
The first rule of trading — there are probably many first rules — is don’t get caught in a situation in which you can lose a great deal of money for reasons you don’t understand.
On making a million:
Michael [Marcus] taught me one thing that was incredibly important… He taught me that you couldmake a million dollars. He showed me that if you applied yourself, great things could happen. It is very easy to miss the point that you really can do it. He showed me that if you take a position and use discipline, you can actually make it.” (more…)
Ed Seykota: The Jademaster
Lots of people go into trading as a way to get rich quick. The fact is that rarely if ever will happen. Trading is a career and a life-long study. The markets are always changing, and they are always the same. I have invested so much time, money, and study into trading. To excel in trading requires extremely hard work and discipline. The same combination required for excellence in any field.
If you knew that is not way to fail in trading, how hard would you like to work on it? Would you ever quit?
Seykota is considered to be one of the best traders to ever live. The following story helped me immensely and I think of it often, very often.
The Jademaster
One cold winter morning a young man walks five miles through the snow. He knocks on the Jademaster’s door. The Jademaster answers with a broom in his hand.
“Yes?”
“I want to learn about Jade.”
“Very well then, come in out of the cold.”
They sit by the fire sipping hot green tea. The Jademaster presses a green stone deeply into the young man’s hand and begins to talk about tree frogs. After a few minutes, the young man interrupts.
“Excuse me, I am here to learn about Jade, not tree frogs.”
The Jademaster takes the stone and tells the young man to go home and return in a week. The following week the young man returns. The Jademaster presses another green stone into the young man’s hand and continues the story. Again, the young man interrupts. Again, the Jademaster sends him home. Weeks pass. The young man interrupts less and less. The young man also learns to brew the hot green tea, clean up the kitchen and sweep the floors. Spring comes.
One day, the young man observes, “The stone I hold is not genuine Jade.”
Patience is a virtue
As a professional trader I still get all the urges to system chase and break the rules as much as anyone, but the key is learning how to control those urges.
This week has seen some fantastic set ups in the market, and I have known which way the price would likely move thanks to the powerful tools I have at my disposal, but the problem has been that the price just hasn’t been retracing to the levels that I have been waiting at.
This can cause some people to want to just jump in because they have been right about the overall direction the last 10 times, or even worse some people may even be tempted to enter the market without using a stop loss thinking that the price will come their way in the end.
These urges and acting upon them show a lack of patience and discipline and this is what the market punishes the most. (more…)
Market Volatility
Many, many times traders are quite conscientious and self-controlled in most areas of their lives, but experience lapses of discipline specific to trading. When this happens, it’s often the case that the trading itself–*how* they’re trading–is artificially creating the failure to follow trading rules. A key culprit in all this is market volatility. Volatility changes from day to day and week to week. It also varies as a function of time of day. Frequently, traders trade a fixed size and set fixed targets and stops, heedless of the underlying market volatility. In a low volatility environment, they fail to hit their targets and get stopped out, criticizing themselves for leaving money on the table. In an environment of enhanced volatility, the market will blow through their stops or exceed their targets, leaving them feeling that they did not trade well. This is especially true when traders find themselves unable to take what is normal heat in an environment of raised volatility. In such cases, it really isn’t a lapse of discipline causing the problem. Rather, the trader is not adapting to market conditions. Adhering to fixed rules in a variable environment is not necessarily a virtue. Changing markets can prevent us from enacting those fixed rules.
Traders’ Discipline
Top daytraders have the discipline to follow their daytrading system rigorously, because they know that only the trades that are signaled by their system have a greater rate of success. Matching a method of trading with your personality is the only way you will ever feel comfortable in the markets. Some websites have sought to profit from day traders by offering them hot tips and stock picks for a fee.
Day trading is an investment tactic with a relatively short investment. You need to position yourself so that you can endure long strings of losses, and maintain your day trading system. (more…)
Emotional Discipline
The key to trading success is emotional discipline. If intelligence were the key, there would be a lot more people making money trading. I know this will sound like a cliche, but the single most important reason that people lose money in the financial markets is that they don’t cut their losses short.”