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TEN WAYS TO LOSE MONEY

After many hours of toil and deep thought I have compiled a dependable guide for stock traders: Ten Ways to Lose Money on Wall Street. I shall not attempt to explain or qualify these precepts, realizing that my readers will doubtless follow them regardless of any advice, from any source, to the contrary.

1. Put your trust in boardroom gossip.
2. Believe everything you hear, especially tips.
3. If you don’t know—guess.
4. Follow the public.
5. Be impatient.
6. Greedily hang on for the top eighth.
7. Trade on thin margins.
8. Hold to your own opinion, right or wrong.
9. Never stay out of the market.
10. Accept small profits and large losses.

31 Precepts for Traders

These precepts are trading and investing guidelines that give a compass heading to trading integrity.

I offer them to you in their raw form. Some may make sense, others not. Please feel free to question, challenge, refine and edit with your responses.

  1. We are who we are and we start from where we start
  2. Each of us brings unique strengths to the markets
  3. Every morning we agree to play as delighted beginners
  4. Reality Pays. The more our minds model the market, the more in synch we get
  5. We build on our strengths and manage everything else.
  6. The outcome we have is the outcome we want
  7. If what you are doing isn’t working over and over again, re-examine your internal models
  8. Our internal process is more important than anything else because it drives everything else
  9. You have the resources to improve your mental trading game. Coaching just helps find them
  10. We begin our trading practice slowly and build it with flow and grace
  11. Lean into fear. Fear is a primary cause of failure
  12. If you are frustrated with the markets, that means they aren’t following the internal model you have projected on them
  13. We increase the level of our awareness rather than the intensity of trading
  14. As we expand our awareness, our interventions will happen sooner and be more creative and effective
  15. We respect ourselves and celebrate our profits no matter how large
  16. If we can experience a new behavior for a moment, we can experience it for a minute, an hour, a week, a year.
  17. Change happens when we experience a new behavior that is aligned with who we are, feels emotionally satisfying in the moment and takes us to where we want to go
  18. Avoidance is buying pain on credit with interest
  19. If self-criticism made us trade better we would all be rich
  20. We allow the markets to breathe through us
  21. The markets are messy, our information is imperfect, our systems will fail and we can still make money
  22. All trading systems are successful in some markets, all trading systems will eventually fail in all markets
  23. The markets don’t care about you or your position
  24. We seek the practice rather than the result
  25. Learn about yourself with the delight of an anthropologist finding a lost tribe
  26. We make internal maps of the market, but our maps are always distorted
  27. Our negative responses are created by our maps, not the market
  28. By changing our map, we change how we respond to the markets
  29. All our trading errors have an ultimate positive purpose or intention
  30. There is no “failure” just feedback
  31. You have all the resources you need, although some may be out of your awareness