Overtrading is a major obstacle for profitability. People tend to overtrade when they don’t have a plan for the trading day/week.
If overtrading is a major issue for professional traders, lack of discipline is a major issue for developing traders. (more…)
Archives of “discipline” tag
rssART OF TRADING Golden Rules
1. Always wait for the setup: No Setup-No Trade. 2. THE BEST trades work almost right away. 3. Never take a big loss. If it doesn’t ‘feel’ right. Remove it! 4. Always perfect your craft and sharpen your skills(good traders are constantly learning) 5. Be patient with winning trades: Impatient with trades that fight back. 6. DISCIPLINE is the key to winning at everything! 7. Never get emotionally attached to trades, trading, losses or profits. 8. Always trade with the size that makes you unemotional(emotional trading is the quickest way out of this game). 9. Keeps things simple and do not over-think or over-complicate your trading. LESS IS ALWAYS MORE. 10. Stay humble at all times.
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The traits of a successful trader
The most important is discipline – I am sure everyone says that. Second, you have to have patience; if you have a good trade on, you have to be able to stay with it. Third, you need courage to go into the market, and courage comes from adequate capitalization. Fourth, you must have a willingness to lose; that is also related to adequate capitalization. Fifth, you need a strong desire to win.” – Gary Bielfeldt
20 Trading Advice for Traders
You have to love trading to do the work that takes you over the hump to winning.
Successful traders are not born, they are built through hard work and discipline.
Trading is not complicated, discipline, perseverance, risk management, passion, and a winning method that fits your personality is all you need. If you have them you will win, if you are missing one you lose.
Where you are currently as a trader is not where you have to stay, the right homework done with an open mind can move you into a different place.
Trading skill is built through work ethic.
You must dedicate yourself to winning at trading. Every day you improve by working at it. (more…)
10 Points -Why Traders lose Money
Not honoring your original stops. Big losses make winning systems losing ones.
- Quit trading it during draw downs. All systems have losing streaks, the key is to manage risk and stick to it until the system gets make to a winning streak.
- Lack of discipline, drifting from taking defined entries and exit signals to opinions is hazardous.
- Trading too big, no system can survive huge positions sizing that makes the first string of losses the last.
- Style drift is deadly, slowly changing your trading plan during active trades is not good. Research comes after hours and before changes are made. (more…)
5 bits of trading wisdom
- Most of the time, you want to own the stock before it breaks out, then sell it to the momentum players after it breaks out. If you buy breakouts, realize that professional traders are handing off their positions to you in order to test the strength of the trend. They will typically buy it back below the breakout point—which is typically where you will set your stop when you buy a breakout. Greed comes into play when the stock breaks out again, and the momentum players are forced to chase it and “pay up” for the stock. Be aware of how trends are established and use that to your advantage to enter and exit positions.
- Embracing your opinion leads to financial ruin. When you find yourself rationalizing or justifying a decline by saying things like, “They are just shaking out weak hands here,” or “The market makers are just dropping the bid here,” then you are embracing your opinion. Don’t hang onto a loser. Cut your losses. You can always get back in.
- Unfortunately, discipline is typically not learned until you have wiped out a trading account. Until you have wiped out an account, you typically think it cannot happen to you. It is precisely that attitude that makes you hold onto losers and rationalize them all the way into the ground.
- Siphoning out your trading profits each month and sticking them in a money market account is a good practice. This action helps to focus your attitude that this is a business, and your business should generate profits on a monthly basis.
- “Professional traders only place a small portion of their assets into 1 position. Or if they take on a large position, then they strictly limit their risk to 1-2% of their current equity. Amateurs typically place a large portion of their assets into 1 position, and they give it “room to move” in case they are actually right. This type of situation creates emotions that ruin accounts, while professionals are able to make decisions and cut losses because they strictly define their risk.”
ARE YOU A GAMBLER?
1) The Gambler Trades Through Earnings Reports: If you are a trader (as opposed to an investor) and decide to hold a stock/option position through earnings you are gambling. Due to the very nature of earnings reports your position could gap down or up; therefore, you are choosing to take a big chance (e.g., gamble) on what that stock will do post earnings. Sure, you could get lucky and win big, but you could also lose big. Long term success in the stock market is not about luck, but about skill. There will always be another trade on another day. Think before you trade making sure the odds (i.e. the probabilities) are with you, not against you.
2) The Gambler Trades Without A Plan: If you make your trading decisions based on the morning news, on the latest BLUE CHANNELS story, on a new strategy not yet tested, or on a market that you have never traded, then you are gambling. The successful trader has an army of stocks to trade, the weapons suited for that army, and a time tested trading strategy in place before a position is considered. When everything is going according to plan then and only then will it be time to pull the trigger.
3) The Gambler Goes ALL IN and Risks Losing It All: If you trade ALL IN, believing your trading edge is 100% foolproof, then you are a gambler. There is no sure thing in the stock market. There are just too many variables and too many traders who can and will disagree with your perfect signal. The disciplined trader trades a small percentage of his account balance and believes in probabilities, not a sure thing, knowing that trading is not about being right but about making money.
It is best to leave gambling to the casinos where the house has the advantage. In trading, the trader who has the focus, patience, and discipline to follow a strategy will have the advantage over those who don’t every time. We trade the trader, not the market and when we make money it is usually when we trade against the gambling trader.
The Market is Not Flexible, But You Are
In trading, and in anything in life, we need to be focus and committed to achieving excellence in what ever we do. However, you need to remember that there will always be more than one way to reach a destination. Yes, let me repeat, there will always be more than one way to achieving a goal.
Stay committed to your decisions but stay flexible in your approach.
If you believe what I say, and you should at least try to, then you’ll realise that the methodology that you’ve learnt about trading is the only thing you know at the moment. And, unfortunately for many, you don’t know what you don’t know.
To overcome that, you need to be hungry and curious about learning new markets and new trading systems all the time – continuous development. Nonetheless, you’ll also need to be discipline and structured about how you learn them. The last thing you want to do is to be jumping around trading everything that moves in the market place. Do you get my point?
Once you become a flexible trader, you can trade anything you want and make as much money (from the market) as you like. Right?
Now, the key question. If the market has no influence on you (as to how you make money), how can it have any influence on you now?
Not That Simple
Becoming a good trader doesn’t happen overnight. Just as with any other skill or discipline, it requires time and practice to become proficient at it:
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3 Types of Confidence
I see three types of confidence among traders:
First, is what I call ‘false confidence’ That’s the person who talks big and poses like a big shot. This type of person often takes big risks in an effort to either impress others or to assuage their own discomfort, and the results can be terrible.
Next, there is temporary confidence, which is conditional on recent performance. This is the person whose self-esteem is tied to their account equity or P&L. When on a good run, they feel confident and take larger risks (often the prelude to giving it all back). And when performance is lousy they start grasping at anything, maybe exiting winners prematurely or taking on excessive risk to get their money back.
Finally, we have true confidence. This is confidence that does not depend on recent results. It is based on a deep sense of inner trust. This is the person who has a history of doing the right thing, regardless of the outcome. Doing the right thing in the sense that they act in their own best interest and trust and understand that doing such over time has a positive impact on results. The trust runs deep enough to provide resilience in the face of disappointment. This is true self-confidence, the kind you want in trading and in life.
Almost everyone says that discipline is a requirement to succeed in trading. But most people never talk about what really underlies that type of discipline. The answer……true self-confidence.