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Winning Traders -Never Quit

1. They accept losing trades quickly but it does not define them, they learn and try again. This trade more wise than the last one.
2. They compartmentalize emotions by not blaming themselves but understanding the historical expectancy of their systems returns. 
3. They have a bias toward action by constantly doing things that move them closer to their goal of being a rich trader. (Homework, chart study, reading, being mentored, back testing)
4. They change their minds sometimes, they know when to stop doing something that does not work and move in the direction of trading success through new lessons. 
5. They prepare for things to go wrong through risk management an position sizing  instead of just going naively toward their goals they are ready to make adjustments as needed.
6. They’re comfortable with discomfort, they will accept losses and draw downs in their method, they are willing to pay tuition to the markets to get to where they want to be.
7. They’re willing to wait, they patiently improve each day setting themselves up for those winning trades that will be very profitable in the future.
8. They have trading heroes that inspire them to be better than they are now and give them the hope of achieving their dreams.
9. They have more than passion they are on a mission, their desire for success gives them the drive to not quit until they win.
10. They know only time separates them from their goals of wealth.

Seven Habits of Ineffective Traders

  1. When people won’t do their own homework.
  2. When people can’t explain their reasoning for a trade.
  3. When people make things more complicated than they need to be.
  4. When people enter a trade for a good reason, then lose their nerve and exit too soon.
  5. When people hesitate, or follow others, and enter a trade too late.
  6. When people will not contemplate the real reasons for their failures.
  7. A defeatist attitude, especially in me.

Trading Wisdom-One Liners

  • Look at your trading as a series of probabilities, don’t focus on any single profit or loss.LOP1
  • Want what the market wants.
  • Do your homework. Come prepared to each day’s trading.
  • Never take a trade on the open in the direction of a that day’s gap.
  • Don’t risk too much of your trading capital on any single idea.
  • Remain flexible.
  • Believe what you see. If the market’s going up or down, it’s going up or down.
  • Anything can happen. The wildness lies in wait.
  • Verify your trading methods or systems.
  • Caveat emptor (“Let the buyer beware.”) when buying a trading system or hiring a mentor.
  • Your own personal psychology will express itself regardless of your chosen method.
  • An opinion isn’t worth much, your own or someone else’s.
  • Watch how the markets react to the news.
  • Learn from your mistakes.
  • Stay in the now. Don’t trade yesterday, today. Don’t trade tomorrow, today.
  • Don’t worry about a missed opportunity. Another one is on the way. Besides there were several that just passed of which you were totally unaware.
  • If you don’t risk, you can’t make money. If you lose all your trading capital, you can’t trade. Find balance.
  • Markets don’t go in a single direction. The trend will wobble on it’s way to its destination.
  • The trend is your friend. Unless you’re a counter trend trader, and then only it’s end is your friend.
  • Tomorrow’s another day, a whole new trading opportunity. Be optimistic.
  • Forgive yourself. Take the lesson, and move on.

4 Quotes from Michael Marcus

You have to learn how to lose; it is more important than learning how to win. If you think you are always going to be a winner, when you lose, you will develop feelings of hostility and end up blaming the market instead of trying to learn why you lost.

If trading is your life , it is a torturous kind of excitement. But if you are keeping your life in balance, then it is fun. All the successful traders I’ve seen that lasted in the business sooner or later got to that point. They have a balanced life; they have fun outside of trading. You can’t sustain it if you don’t have some other focus. Eventually, you wind up over trading or getting excessively disturbed about temporary failures.

I think the leading cause of financial disablement is the belief that you can rely on the experts to help you. It might, if you know the right expert….Typically, however, these so-called “experts” are not traders. Your average broker couldn’t be a trader in a million years. More money is lost listening to brokers than any other way. Trading requires an intense personal involvement. You have to do your own homework, and that is what I advise people to do.

Perhaps the most important rule is to hold on to your winners and cut your losers. Both are equally important. If you don’t stay with your winners, you are not going to be able to pay the losers.
You also have to follow your own light. Because I have so many friends who are talented traders, I often have to remind myself that if I try to trade their way, or on their ideas, I am going to lose. Every trader has strengths and weakness. Some are good holders of winners, but may hold their losers a little too long. Others may cut their winners a little short, but are quick to take their losses. As long as you stick to your own style, you get the good and bad in your own approach. When you try to incorporate someine else’s style, you often wind up with the worst of both styles. I’ve done that a lot.

Trading To Win

One of the easiest mistakes any trader can make is not a ‘trading’ mistake at all. Rather, the mistake is complacency with his or her trading skills and knowledge. Unfortunately, trading is not like riding a bike – you can (and will) forget how. Obviously you’ll always know how to enter orders, but the efficiency and accuracy of your trading will diminish without constant renewal of your trading mindset.

The reason that most traders don’t undergo psychological self-development is a lack of time, and that’s understandable. However, a good book, DVD or Coaching Class is actually an investment in yourself, and ultimately an investment in your bottom line. Today as a primer, and a challenge, I’d like to review some self-development concepts that Ari Kiev explores in his book ‘Trading To Win, The Psychology Of Managing The Markets‘. This in no way is a substitute for his excellent book, but they are still useful ideas even in this abbreviated form. None of them are going to be new to you, but all of them will be valuable to you.

1. Plan the entire trade before you enter the trade. Have an entry strategy, and an exit point (both a winning exit point and a non-winning exit point). This will inherently force you to look at your risk/reward ratio. Write these entries and exits down in a journal.

2. Eliminate distractions.
It’s difficult enough to find trading time at all if it’s not your regular job. If you’re a part-time trader who trades at work between meetings and phone calls, think about this: there are full-time professional traders who are concentrating on nothing other than taking your money. It’s not that they’re better or smarter than you – they just have the time to focus. If you must trade, set aside blocks of time to study or trade without distraction. Or it may be more feasible to do your trading on an end-of day basis, meaning you
place your orders and do your ‘homework’ the night before when you can
focus on it.

3. Choose a method or a small group of methods, and stick to them.
Far too often we see a trader adopt a new indicator or signal only to see it backfire. Become a master of your favorite signals, rather than a slave to any and every signal. Understand that an indicator will fail sometimes. That’s ok. The sizable winning trades should more than offset the small losing trades initiated by an errant signal. This trading method is designed to eliminate the emotional bias of trading.

4. Choosing not to trade can also be a prudent choice. You’ll frequently hear ‘don’t fight the tape’. The same idea also applies to a flat market – you can’t make stocks do something they’re just not going to do. Wait for good entries into a developing trend rather than force a bad entry into an unclear trend. (more…)

10 Foolish Things a Trader are Doing

  1. Try to predict the future movement of a stock, and stay in it no matter what.
  2. Risk your entire account on one trade with no stop loss plan.
  3. Have a winning trade but no exit strategy to get out, no trailing stop or exhaustion top signal.
  4. Ask for and follow the advice of others instead of trading with your own trading plan, method, rules, and system.
  5. Trade your emotions instead of signals: buy when you are greedy and sell when you are afraid.
  6. Trade your opinions, not a quantified method.
  7. Do not bother to do your homework on trading, just jump in and trade, you are smart, you will figure it out.
  8. Short the best and most expensive stocks in the stock market and buy the cheapest junk stocks.
  9. Put on trades you are 100% sure are winners so you do not even need a stop loss or risk management.
  10. Buy more of a trade that you are losing money in and sell your winners quickly to lock in small profits.

10 Foolish Things a Trader Can Do

01. Try to predict the future movement of a stock, and stay in it no matter what.

02. Risk your entire account on one trade with no stop loss plan.

03. Have a winning trade but no exit strategy to get out, no trailing stop or exhaustion top signal.

04. Ask for and follow the advice of others instead of trading with your own trading plan, method, rules, and system.

05. Trade your emotions instead of signals: buy when you are greedy and sell when you are afraid.

06. Trade your opinions, not a quantified method. (more…)

Trading With A Plan

A planned trade is one that is guided consciously, filtered according to a variety of criteria that are designed to provide a positive expectancy. The opposite of a planned trade is an impulsive one, in which traders enter markets before explicitly identifying what they are doing and why. The difference between planned and unplanned trading is one of intentionality: being proactive in taking controlled risks vs. being reactive to what has already occurred in markets. Even the most intuitive and active trader can trade in a planned manner, if many of the elements of planning are achieved prior to entering positions.

So what are these elements of planning? The ideal trade identifies:

1) What you’re trading – Why are you selecting one instrument to trade (one stock, one index) versus others? Which instruments maximize reward relative to risk?

2) How much you’re trading – How much of your capital are you going to allocate to the trade idea versus other ideas?

3) Why you’re trading – What is the rationale for the trade? Why does the trade idea provide you with an “edge”?

4) What will take you out of the trade – What would lead you to determine that your trade idea is wrong? What would tell you that the trade has reached its profit potential?

5) Where you will enter the trade – Given the criteria that would take you out of the trade, where will you execute your idea to maximize the reward you’ll obtain relative to the risk you’ll be taking?

6) How you will manage the trade – What would have to happen to convince you to add to the trade, scale out of it, and/or tighten your stop loss? (more…)

10 Top Trading Commandments


  • Discipline trumps conviction. Don’t let your bad trades turn into investments.

  • Perception is reality in the market. Adapt your style to the market, and learn to accept the market as it is, not how you wish it was.

  • Play great defense, not great offense. Opportunities are made up easier than losses.

  • Don’t confine your thinking in terms of boundaries. Expect the extreme, and don’t miss major profit opportunities.

  • Know your companies. Hold your stock as long as it is performing properly, cut your losses fast, and don’t “hope” for a rebound.

  • Risk control is important. Always quantify your risk going into a trade.

  • Be diligent and thorough in your research. Do your homework, recap each day, and learn from your mistakes.

  • Don’t get caught in a situation in which you could lose a great deal of money for reasons you don’t understand.

  • Respect the price action, but never defer to it. When unsure, trade “in between.”

  • Emotion is the enemy when trading. Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy.

  • 5 Mistakes Traders Make Again & Again

    There is a big difference between bad traders and good traders, here is what I think separates one from the other:

    1. Bad traders continually have the desire to short the hottest  stocks with the strongest momentum. What is their reasoning? “It can’t go any higher, this price is ridiculous.” Do they understand it is a bull market, no. Do they understand the technicals or fundamentals that are driving this stock? No. Bad traders just trade their beliefs good traders trade proven methods.
    2. Bad traders continually believe they have found the trade “That just can’t lose.” It is a sure thing. No doubt about it. They trade BIG, they trade a HUGE position size. Unfortunately the most obvious trades are usually the losing trades, so they lose, and lose big. Good traders divide out their trades so that no one trade has too big of an impact on their account. Good traders realize EVERY trade can win or lose so they plan a quick exit for if they are wrong.
    3. Bad traders do not do the proper homework before they begin to trade. Really  Bad traders enter the markets with a mile of ego along with mud puddle deep understanding of what really works in trading. Bad traders have the belief that they are more clever than the markets and they can win based on their own intelligence. The problem is they do not do the homework of studying charts, trends, robust systems, winning methods, the right psychology for winning traders, risk/reward ratios, or the danger of the risk of ruin, or how the top performing stocks acted historically, and on and on. The good traders learn what it takes to succeed in trading, the complete story, while the bad traders learn some basics and think they are ready. They are wrong. The markets will show them.
    4. Bad traders make low probability trades, they are where the profits come from for the good traders. They go short in bull markets and long in bear markets. They sell naked puts on stocks collapsing into death spirals and sell calls on the best momentum stocks. They trade with big risks for small profits. They have a few small wins but some really huge losses. When they have a winner they take the profits quickly, but if they have a loser they let it run hoping that it will come back. They are the ones that lose the money, they are on the other side of the good traders trades.
    5. Bad traders want a good tip. They just want to be handed a winning system or a hot stock that just can’t lose. They do not even understand what all the talk of trading psychology and risk management is all about. They don’t need all that, they just want to make money. They just want the fish, they do not care about the fishing pole, bait, boat, or how to fish. Unfortunately they were to busy looking for that fish and didn’t understand the art of fishing, they will drown in the market ocean because they never learned how to swim themselves.