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The Secret To Success

  
  Education
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Never forget: This very moment, we can change our lives. There never was a moment, and never will be, when we are without the power to alter our destiny. – Steven Pressfield

One of the greatest powers of Resistance and procrastination is that they compound themselves over years and decades. They can build to the point where they make you feel as if you have no control over your own destiny. They make it easier to just give up and be normal.

Pressfield reminds us that we are always in possession of the power to change the course of our lives. At any single moment of our lives, we are capable of completely altering the way things are going. 

After years of allowing the Resistance to hold us back in our trading, the chances of ever achieving trading success might seem bleak. It is important to keep in mind that we always possess the power to change that. We can beat the Resistance and procrastination through diligent and consistent work.

That is the one and only secret to trading success. It is also the one and only secret to success in just about any other field you might want to pursue.

Focus on You

  
  Education
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It is never the system or author writing the trading book that fails.
It is YOU! It is your lack of focus.
Focus on yourself and then you can focus on trading successfully.

Trading is at least 98% psychological. It’s a mental state of mind based upon your beliefs of what may happen. Books, systems and technical indicators can only take you so far! You must accept and understand that the market is all in your head. It is you versus the other trader. If you don’t understand YOU, how will you ever understand other traders; thus taking advantage of market moves based on their mental state of mind and their underlying beliefs.

Many investors, both novice and experienced, drift from book to book to book and system to system to system, never understanding why they produce inconsistent profits. They are confused, looking at too many things, complicating the entire process while ignoring the essentials to success.

Keep it simple.

Why complicate things when simplicity works; especially when it comes to trading? We know that trading may be the most difficult endeavor that any human may attempt to undertake.

Thousands of different systems work in the stock market so we can conclude that it is the user that ultimately fails because of lack of concentration and motivation to stay the course. Wall Street is not for drifters and most people can’t play the game profitably because they never sharpen their own mental skills while applying basic money management techniques. They focus on the wrong set of skills.

We all see people come and go every day: rags to riches to rags. They are motivated for weeks, months and sometimes years but most fizzle away after they fail and can’t figure out what they are doing wrong. Some investors copy a system from a so-called guru and may find success for a while but they don’t tailor it to their personality, integrate it with their investing style and focus on their mental state of mind, therefore, it will become obsolete and they will fail. Working hard to become successful in the market is fine but understand that working smarter will always take you further.

Our goal as traders and investors is to understand the crowd and anticipate how they will act and react based on the thoughts we had, prior to focusuing on the proper skills, when we were just one of the sheep (waiting to be slaughtered)!

Focus on what is important and the success will follow.

Stop focusing on iffy stochastics, Bollinger bands, MACD, ADX, earnings releases and bogus news stories. Yes they can aid you to success but the main focus is on you!

Personally speaking, I require specific fundamentals, price, volume and basic daily and weekly charts to succeed but they are secondary tools. They can help me make money as long as I am focusing on the overall picture which is my mental focus and my emotional balance.

I know I am getting all “Dr. Perruna” on you but it is true.

Once your conscious mind understands how the beliefs of the crowd work, your subconscious mind takes over and intuition kicks in and you start making some of the best decisions of your life by flawlessly following your system.

As Jesse Livermore said:

“Wall Street never changes, the pockets change, the stocks change, but Wall Street never changes, because human nature never changes”

Why? Because humans never change!

Once you understand this and learn to trade other humans, you will become successful. Yes, you will need some of the tools mentioned above but don’t focus your attention in this area. Focus when investing by mastering the beliefs of the crowd and you will always be one step ahead.

Fear in the Markets

  
  Education
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I think there is something to be said for the idea fear-based arguments standing out in people’s minds. Highly charged, emotionally relevant information is certainly processed differently from normal information, which is why advertisers will show very happy people drinking Coke, or people having car wrecks relying on their insurers. The correlations of investor margin debt and price movements of the markets might be one way to quantify how fear impacts speculative behavior …

That having been said, I do notice a kind of cultishness to the permabears… it is an ingrained belief that organizes their thinking about markets, the future, etc. The motivation, I suspect, is a desire to belong to a special group that will be spared the oncoming calamity.

Five Trading Virtues: Best Practices for Traders

  
  Education
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1) Preparation to start the day and week: Having a clearly formulated strategy to guide trading decisions;

2) Keeping score: Using a trading journal to structure learning, document progress, and sustain positive motivation;

3) Managing risk and maximizing opportunity: Trading with more risk/size when trading well and clearly seeing opportunity and pulling back risk when drawing down, trading poorly, and perceiving little opportunity;

4) Taking breaks: Stepping back from markets periodically to gain fresh perspective, reformulate views, and tweak strategies;

5) Treating trading as a business: Limiting overhead, having a clearly defined plan to move toward profitability, focusing on distinctive areas of strengths and opportunity.

So much of what makes traders great is what they do between market sessions, how they do it, and how much of it they do.

This Brilliant Pyramid Outlines The 6 Steps To Financial Success

  
Analysis, Education
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You’ve probably heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

It’s the ranking of primary human needs for psychological well-being as described by American psychologist Abraham Harold Maslow, and is usually illustrated not unlike the old-school food pyramid:

 The financial blogger known only as Mister Squirrel recently shared his own version of Maslow’s hierarchy: the path to financial success.

Here’s what it looks like:

6-PYRAMID (more…)

Five Qualities For Successful Trader

  
  Education
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  1. Capacity for Prudent Risk-taking.The young successful trader is not afraid to go after markets aggressively when the opportunity presents itself.
  2. Capacity for Rule Governance. The young successful trader has the self-control to follow rules in the heat of battle, such as rules of position sizing and risk management.
  3. Capacity for Sustained Effort.The trader uses productive time to do research, preparation, work on himself, outside of market hours.
  4. Capacity for Emotional Resilience. All young traders will lose money early in their development and experience multiple frustrations. The successful ones will not lose self-confidence and motivation in the face of loss and frustrations.
  5. Capacity for Sound reasoning. The successful young trader exhibits an ability to synthesize data and generate market and trading scenarios.

Optimism for Traders

  
  Education
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  • When good things happens to an optimist, he says it’s permanent, pervasive, and personal. When a bad thing happens to an optimist, she says it’s temporary, specific, and not personal.
  • Because the optimistic trader looks with bright enthusiasm towards the future, she is able to be realistic about what has happened in the past and is happening in the present. A pessimistic trader who has limiting doubts about his future trading, may be unwilling to admit what has happened or is actually occurring.

Ten Core Ideas of Trading Psychology

  
  Education
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1) We are most likely to behave in inhibited or impulsive ways, violating trading rules and plans, when we perceive events to be threatening;

2) What we perceive to be threatening is a joint function of events themselves and how we think about those events;

3) A key to gaining control over trading and maintaining consistency is to be able to reduce the threat associated with market events and process adverse outcomes in normal, routine ways;

4) We can reduce the threat associated with adverse market events through proper money management (position sizing) and through proper risk management (limits on losses per position);

5) We can reduce the threat associated with adverse market events by training ourselves to respond calmly to adverse outcomes (exposure methods) and by restructuring how we think about those outcomes (cognitive methods);

6) Optimal skill development in trading will occur in non-threatening environments in which learners can sustain concentration, optimism, and motivation;

7) A proper mindset is therefore necessary to the development of trading skills, but does not substitute for such development;

8) The cultivation of trading expertise is a function of the amount of time and effort devoted to learning and the proper structuring of that time and effort;

9) Proper structuring of learning involves the setting of specific, doable, cumulative goals and the provision of rapid feedback and correction regarding the achievement of those goals;

10) Practice does not make perfect in trading or anything else; perfect practice makes perfect. Training must gradually build competencies and correct deficiencies in a manner that sustains a positive mindset and optimal concentration and motivation.

Conscientiousness and Trading

  
  Education
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  • Self-Efficacy. Self-Efficacy describes confidence in one’s ability to accomplish things. High scorers believe they have the intelligence (common sense), drive, and self-control necessary for achieving success in trading. Low scorers do not feel effective, and may have a sense that they are not in control of their trading. However, consideration needs to be given to motivation for success as complacency with the way things are may be the reason for a low score.
  • Orderliness. Traders with high scores on orderliness are well-organized and stick to routines and schedules. They tend to make trading plans and use them. Low scorers tend to be disorganized and scattered. Trading plans are viewed as not being important as rules are too confining.
  • Dutifulness. This scale reflects the strength of a person’s ability to stick to a trading plan. Those who score high on this scale have a strong sense of moral obligation. Low scorers find trading plans overly confining and thus less likely to follow or even create one. Perhaps trading is seen as more of a “hobby” or just for “fun.”
  • Achievement-Striving. Individuals who score high on this scale strive hard to achieve excellence. Their drive to be recognized as successful keeps them on track toward their goals. Low scorers are content to get by with a minimal amount of work, and might be seen by others as lazy.
  • Self-Discipline. One of the largest contributors to success as a trader is self-discipline. High scorers are able to strictly adhere to a trading plan and stay on track despite distractions. Low scorers procrastinate, are easily discouraged and show poor follow-through. The lack of self-discipline will make your trading career rather short lived.
  • Cautiousness. Cautiousness describes the disposition to think through possibilities before acting. High scorers on the Cautiousness scale take their time when making trading decisions and manage risk well. Low scorers often trade without deliberating alternatives and the probable consequences of those alternatives. Scoring too high on this scale can have its downside as trading opportunities may be missed for the discretionary trader. The more mechanical systems trader will account for this through their strategy.

Goal-Setting, Discipline, and the Emotions of Traders

  
  Education
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Discipline problems typically begin with experiences of frustration.

Frustration is a function of not meeting goals and expectations.
Many times, traders try to adopt psychological strategies for combating frustration. These can be helpful, but they don’t get at the root of the frustration problem.
If we do not set challenging, but feasible goals, we cannot experience ourselves as effective, successful people. Goals that are perfectionistic cannot be met and thus generate frustration.
The failure to set goals robs us of opportunities for cultivating a sense of purpose and well-being.
Goal-setting is not just essential to mastering markets; it’s essential as a tool of psychological management. We shape our experience of ourselves by controlling what we pursue and how we evaluate the pursuit.
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