“Years of experience eventually teach you that your main battle, always, is with yourself — your propensity for errors, for rationalizing marginal hands into good hands, lack of concentration, misreading other players, emotional eruptions, impatience, and so on. Your opponents are merely dim outlines that come and go. Few of them ever reach the exalted heights of damage that you can inflict on yourself.”
– Larry Phillips, Zen and the Art of Poker
Many great traders have expressed some version of the opinion, “Your greatest opponent is yourself.” Do you agree?
If so, what are the implications?
On the positive side, if “we have met the enemy and he is us,” as Pogo once said, what does that say about growth opportunity?
If you had perfect discipline, perfect motivation, and perfect emotional control, how good (or great) a trader could you be?
I learned how to play poker at a very young age. You don’t just play every hand and stay through every card, because if you do, you will have a much higher probability of losing. You should play the good hands, and drop out of the poor hands, forfeiting the ante. When more of the cards are on the table and you have a very strong hand — in other words, when you feel the percentages are skewed in your favor — you raise and play that hand to the hilt.If you apply the same principles of poker strategy to trading, it increases your odds of winning significantly.