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10 KEYS TO SUCCESS

1.  How you think is everything – always be positive.  Think success, not failure.  Beware of a negative environment.

2.  Decide upon your true dreams and goals.  Write down your specific goals and develop a plan to reach them.

3.  Take action.  Goals are nothing without action.  Don’t be afraid to get started.  Just do it.

4. Never stop learning.  Go back to school or read books.  Get training and acquire skills.

5.  Be persistent and work hard.  Success is a marathon, not a sprint.  Never give up.

6. Learn to analyze details.  Get all the facts, all the input.  Learn from your mistakes.

7. Focus your time and money.  Don’t let other people or things distract you.

8.  Don’t be afraid to innovate.  Be different.  Following the herd is a sure way to mediocrity.

9.  Deal and communicate with people effectively.  No person is an islan.  Learn to understand and motivate others.

10.  Be honest and dependable.  Take responsibility.  Otherwise, nos. 1-9 won’t matter.

12 Quotes From ‘Trading In The Zone'

1. Attitude produces better overall results than analysis or technique.

2. Positive winning attitude = expecting a positive result from your efforts, with an acceptance that whatever results you get are a perfect reflection of your level of development and what you need to learn to get better.

3. Winning in any endeavour is mostly a function of attitude.

4. Losing and being wrong are inevitable realities of trading.

5. The market has no responsibility towards the individual trader. Taking responsibility means acknowledging and accepting, at the deepest part of your identity, that you – not the market – are completely responsible for your success or failure as a trader.

6. If you perceive the endless stream of opportunities to enter and exit trades without self-criticism and regret, then you will be in the best frame of mind to act in your own best interest and learn from your experiences.

7.  You will need to learn how to adjust your attitudes and beliefs about trading in such a way that you can trade without the slightest bit of fear, but at the same time keep a framework in place that does not allow you to become reckless.

8. Trading is an activity that offers the individual unlimited freedom of creative expression.

9. The unlimited characteristics of the trading environment require that we act with some degree of restraint and self-control, at least if we want to create some measure of consistent success.

10. The hard reality of trading is that, if you want to create consistency, you have to start from the premise that no matter what the outcome, you are completely responsible.

11. One of the principal reasons so many successful people have failed miserably at trading is that their success is partly attributable to their superior ability to manipulate and control the social environment, to respond to what they want.  (Unfortunately) the market doesn’t respond to control and manipulation (unless you’re a very large trader).

12. The tools you will use to create this new version of yourself are your willingness and desire to learn, fuelled by your passion to be successful.  Successful traders have virtually eliminated the effects of fear and recklessness from their trading.

Be Imperfect

As a trader – or an investor – you will not be right all of the time. If you can accept your imperfection, and work within it, you will be much more successful:

If you have a perfectionist mentality when trading, you are setting yourself up for failure, because it is a “given” that you will experience losses along the way. You must begin to think of trading as a game of probability. Your losses ( that you hope will return to breakeven) will kill you. If you cannot take a loss when it is small ( because of the need to be perfect), then you will watch that small loss grow into a larger loss and so on into a vicious cycle of more and more pain for the perfectionist. Trading on hope does not work. The markets can remain irrational for a lot longer than you can remain solvent.

The object should be excellence in trading, not perfection. Moreover, it is essential to strive for excellence over a sustained period, as opposed to judging that each trade must be excellent. This is a marathon…not a sprint.

The greatest traders know how to take cut losses and let winning positions run. Perfectionists often do exactly the opposite. They get in at the wrong time, stay in too long and then get out the wrong time. Perfectionists are always striving and never arriving. The market will find the flaw in a perfectionistic trader and exploit it day after day.

Felix Dennis on Mistaking Desire for Compulsion

  • Wishing for or desiring something is futile without an inner compulsion to achieve it. Such lack of compulsion, if not frankly acknowledged, can lead to great personal unhappiness. We have all met deeply unhappy souls muddling along in professions or careers for which they are patently unsuited.
  • Worse still, by continually wishing and never delivering, you risk denting your confidence, beginning a vicious downward spiral that appears to draw misfortune like a magnet. The assumption that you might be able to achieve some goal if you only wish hard enough is not just a f***-up. It’s a potential personal tragedy.
  • Consider very carefully whether you are truly driven by inner demons to be rich. If you are not, then my earnest and heartfelt advice to you is: do not on any account make the attempt. What are riches anyway, compared to health or the peace of mind that even a modicum of contentment brings in its wake? In and of itself,great wealth very rarely, if ever, breeds contentment.
  • But no condescension is intended whatever when I ask you to quietly turn over in your mind whether or not you are fit to be rich. Whether the sacrifices involved — not only your own, but those you will ask of your family, present or future — are worth the tyranny that such ambition, by its very nature, exacts.
  • ‘Better to have tried and failed than not to have tried at all,’ drones the old saw. But in this instance, the cliche is wrong, utterly wrong. Better to have chosen a different life, a quite different path, than have placed yourself and those you love in harm’s way when early reflection and thought could have advised you differently. I repeat: do not mistake desire for compulsion. Those that do nearly always fail, at great cost to themselves and those around them.

Patience & Confidence

The market, as much as anything in life, has a way of transforming us from cool, calm, collected individuals into irrational, impulsive, disoriented speculators. Clearly it’s in our best interest in terms of long-term profitability to spend the majority of our time in the former group rather than the latter.

Acknowledging when things aren’t going our way is the first step to becoming a more patient trader, but it’s having the patience to wait things out until we find a more harmonic rhythm that contributes immeasurably to our success.

It’s the losing positions that invariably do traders in. A number of the bigger losers many traders experience come as a result of not being patient and waiting on the right opportunity. Many of us tend to press when things aren’t working out, or we’ve just had a losing trade.

Traders can begin to play catch-up and go on an emotional tilt. It’s the paradox of trading in many ways. The same competitive drive we use to achieve our success has components that can hasten our failure.

When going through my daily checklist, I send out to members of my mentoring program, I always emphasize that the markets provide a multitude of chances to trade. One need not force action when the setups aren’t right. Traders who get into positions with “the best of it” or “an edge” significantly increase their chances for success in the long run.

Confidence comes from a number of sources and is developed through successful implementation of a strategy. It is also a byproduct of the unwavering belief that what you are doing will be successful. This is critical because, at the moment of truth, when you are in a position, self-doubt has a way of creeping in. It’s tempting to deviate from your plan at these times.

While I’m not suggesting that you be inflexible in your position management, I am saying that having belief in what you are doing goes a long way toward your success. In fact, it’s the confidence in your trading skill set that can give you the ability to make a decision to get out of a position, knowing that things aren’t working out. This conviction is a hallmark of great leaders and inspires others.

The Same Winning Principles

In life, as in trading, the right mindset is crucial for success. You must be confident in your decisions because they are based on cause and effect, not on emotions or opinion. Negative people who are unsure of themselves are not successful in any field. You need faith in yourself and your methods to be able to persevere and not give up before reaching success.

• You can risk too much and lose it all in your business, life, marriage, friendships or family. You have to measure the potential cost of every action. One affair can cost you your marriage, just like one big trade with too much risk can cost you all your capital.

• In business there are certain methods which bring in customers and turn a profit, and others which cause a business to turn away customers and lose money. Trading is similar: methods which turn a consistent and long-term profit are essential for success.

• Having unrealistic expectations in a marriage, job, or business will lead to unhappiness and failure just like it will in trading. You have to set realistic expectations so
you do not get discouraged easily and quit in any of these areas. You have to be satisfied that the results are worth your effort over the long term. You need to understand what to expect before you begin a marriage, a job, a business, or trading. (more…)

5 Trading Mistakes & Destroy Yourself

  1. 5-rulesInstead of cutting a loss the trader holds it stressing over it for the rest of the day or a week. This destroys the trader’s mental capital and inflicts completely unnecessary emotional pain. The first loss it the best loss.

  2. A trader that trades their opinion instead of the price action has a lower success rate than someone who just trades price action. The vast majority of traders make money by following trends and chart patterns not their own opinion.
  3. A trader who puts on the one big trade that they think they just can’t lose on is usually the one that blows up their account. A trader must always have stops and must always manage risk regardless of their belief in any one trade.
  4. Believing that you are right about a trade and the market is wrong is a sure path to destruction. The market is always right because price is reality. How do we know when we are wrong? We lose money that is proof enough.
  5. A trader who endlessly searches for stock picks and predictions instead of  learning how to trade a robust method while managing their own mind and using risk management is doomed to failure.

     

7 Deadly Sins of Trading

7 Deadly Sins of TradingPerfectionism: There is no perfection in trading as far as making money on every trade or having a perfect system. All you can hope to be perfect at, is following your system, rules, and trading plan. A winning trade should be measured as one in which you followed all your preset guidelines. Even the best traders only average about a 50%-60% win rate at best over long periods of time. The key is having bigger winners than losers, not being perfect. Like in baseball where a .300 hitter can get into the hall of fame. A .500 trader in the market can become wealthy if his wins outpace his losses.

Fear:  Faith in your system is the only way to overcome your fear of trading. You must complete enoughback testing on your system until you know that you have a valid edge over the market in the long term. You must see opportunity in trading not possible losses. You must take your systems trade signals each time and if you can’t overcome your fear of loss and failure then perhaps trading is not the best profession for you.

Pride:  We are not our trading account and staring at our profit and loss too much is a major detriment in one’s trading. Traders must cut losses at their predetermined stop, not pridefully hang on trying to prove they are right. We must separate ourselves from the trading. A person’s value is not tied to a trade or performance record. If we followed our system then we can’t view that as a personal loss. Our system failed us. (more…)

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