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10 Points -Why Traders Lose Their Discipline

  • Environmental distractions and boredom cause a lack of focus – All of us have limits to our attention span and these are easily taxed during quiet times in the market;
  • Fatigue and mental overload create a loss of concentration – The demands of watching the screen hour after hour make it difficult to be sharp, creating fatigue effects that are well-known to pilots, car drivers, and soldiers;
  • Overconfidence follows a string of successes – It is common for traders to attribute success to skill and failure to situational, external factors.  As a result, a string of even random wins can lead traders to become overconfident and veer from trading plans–especially by trading too frequently and/or trading excessive size;
  • Unwillingness to accept losses – This leads traders to alter their trade plans after trades have gone into the red, turning what were meant to be short-term trades into longer-term holds and transforming trades with small size into large trades by adding to losers; (more…)

Simple Formula For Performance.

Potential is what everyone has inside them, it is the education, learning, development, support and time put in that enables one to continually develop their capabilities. This can increase, at least until either physical or mental limitations constrain further growth. 
Interference is what detracts from potential to reduce performance. This can be down to any number of reasons, perhaps environmental or external factors, physical or mental hurdles or limitations, poor execution of process, inadequate self-management. Many of these can be deatlt with in some way; however, the greatest threat in most cases is from attitude and mindset. Perhaps it could be something as simple as seeing yourself failing and recalling the look of an angry parent, a doubting physical education teacher or a school bully from your younger years who always told you that you did not have what it takes. – This creates that painful memory which instils that moment of hesitation or self-doubt just when you least need it. – Who hasn’t at some time during their trading had that pang of self-doubt, or lacked the self-belief or confidence just at a crucial moment, and then looked back with regret and heartache, in some cases leading to a whole cycle of self-doubt and poor decisions, execution and position sizing.

How does the mind of a trader work?

MindpowerIn order to understand behavioral finance and crowd behavior on the capital market, first of all we need to understand the factors that influence the trader mindset. Traders are “misled” by many things. Let us put these factors in two main categories, depending simply on their source, external or internal.

The most important external factor is “everyone else”, the trading crowd, the general opinion. We form an opinion about the others. We believe them to be either smart or stupid, either right or wrong, then choose one of the two main psychological trading strategies: “go along to get along” or be a contrarian. Then we have other external factors like payoffs, scale, psychological and academic background, social structure, external advisory and resources. (more…)

Four Basic Traits of Successful Investors

1. They look at objective indicators. Removing the emotions from the investing process, they focus on data instead of reacting to events;Four Stages
2. They are Disciplined:  The data drives decision making with pre-established rules. External factors do not influence them;
3. They have Flexibility:  The best investors are open-minded to new ideas, or revisiting previous thoughts;
4. They are Risk adverse: Not always obvious to investors, it is a crucial part of successful investing.

5 Qualities of the Top Super Traders

1. A belief that you create your results in life.
Most people don’t understand this concept. They repeat the same mistakes over and over again because they blame their mistakes on external factors. For example, if you blame your bankruptcy in one of my marble games on the person who pulled the 5R marble against you, you are not taking responsibility for your position sizing error of risking 20% (or more!) of your equity on a single trade. Consequently, you’ll repeat this mistake over and over again and there will always be someone to blame for pulling the 5R marble against you.
Conversely, top traders are constantly determining how they produced their results and working to correct their mistakes. They create their reality.
2. The interest and desire to really understand yourself.
You cannot understand how you create your own results if you don’t know yourself intimately. I believe that most people live their lives like the automatons in the movie, The Matrix. They just do their thing, not realizing how much they have been programmed by their culture, and their family and friends rather than understanding that they always have a choice in everything.
The great traders I know continually study and challenge themselves, their thinking, their actions, and their reactions.
3. Discipline to continually work to improve yourself.
Top traders often have a passion to work on themselves. A good trader will probably complete the Peak Performance Course once or twice and internalize many aspects of it. A top trader, or a potential top trader, will go through the course many times and develop a discipline that involves spending 1-4 hours each day working on improving himself or herself. (more…)

Why Traders Lose Their Discipline

  • Environmental distractions and boredom cause a lack of focus – All of us have limits to our attention span and these are easily taxed during quiet times in the market;
  • Fatigue and mental overload create a loss of concentration – The demands of watching the screen hour after hour make it difficult to be sharp, creating fatigue effects that are well-known to pilots, car drivers, and soldiers;
  • Overconfidence follows a string of successes – It is common for traders to attribute success to skill and failure to situational, external factors.  As a result, a string of even random wins can lead traders to become overconfident and veer from trading plans–especially by trading too frequently and/or trading excessive size;
  • Unwillingness to accept losses – This leads traders to alter their trade plans after trades have gone into the red, turning what were meant to be short-term trades into longer-term holds and transforming trades with small size into large trades by adding to losers; (more…)
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