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There's nothing you can do

You might be at a stage of feeling very frustrated with yourself.

I know what this feels like – you begin to marvel at your own lack of discipline and ability to do what you know. It’s like “Arrgh! Why can’t I just WAIT for the damn setup?! Why am I such a screw up at this?!”

Speaking from experience, it’s frustrating because you just want to get on. You have plans and goals and now you see that your own idiocy is preventing you from making any progress towards them. All I can say is that there’s nothing you can do about this period except keep going and wait for it to pass… It’s deeply ingrained. You have to trade through it; six months, a year, two years… Grit your teeth and plow on.

In a way, you have to relax into your own ability to seemingly pick every wrong move in the market. Just accept it. Providing you are not losing big money, you CAN relax into it. The good news is you are in fact building up a tolerance to taking losses during this period – you ARE actually developing a skill. It’s called “risk tolerance.”

If you’re still in that “God dammit!” phase then do this: just keep losing and losing, but begin to try to take the losses without any emotional reaction what so ever and move immediately to the next trade.

Once you can do this, you then move on to learning to let go of your need to have success NOW. This combines with learning to do nothing in the market – learning to wait. Why not wait, you’re gonna lose anyway right? So you might as well wait…

Now you’re building up patience. This is a foundation that leads to a little magic further down the track, when you get to the point where you see that you could take any system and trade it properly to discover its true potential. All those millions of methods you tried for 3 days and abandoned in disgust now sit there like a pile of spare parts in the bike shed. You become interested in them again – there could actually be a few decent ideas amongst that lot.

So learn to lose.
Then learn to wait to lose.

You will be building risk tollerance and patience. There are more steps after that, but there is no way to skip this process, it has to be gone through by all.

Learn To Sell

You know, once you’re down 25-30 percent, you’re in that emotional ‘web’. That you think, “Man, it’s gotta come back”, and you know, “if it just comes back a little bit, I’ll sell”, and then it doesn’t and then you’re down 40 percent. And then it comes back to only down 30 percent, and you’re saying “ok, I’m going to sell it when it comes back to down only 20 percent”, and then it goes right back down.

And then once you’re past 50 and 60 percent, you know what you say to yourself — you know the words, you’ve had it happen to you before, right? “Aaah, screw it, I don’t care if goes to zero!” Right? Isn’t that what you say once you get into ‘the web’?

So don’t let that happen to you. There’s a simple word to protect yourself from big losses in the market. Easy word — “Sell.” “Sell.”

Trading Quotes for Traders

Human emotion is both the source of opportunity in trading and the greatest challenge.
Master it and you will succeed.
Ignore it at your peril.

Trade with an edge, manage risk, be consistent, and keep it simple.
The entire Turtle training, and indeed the basis of all successful trading, can be summed up in these four core principles.

Good trading is not about being right, it’s about trading right.
If you want to be successful, you need to think of the long run and ignore the outcomes of individual trades.

Trading with an edge is what separates the professionals from amateurs.
Ignore this and you will be eaten by those who don’t.

Edges are found in the places between the battleground between buyers and sellers.
Your task as a trader is to find those places and wait to see who wins and who loses.

Mature understanding of and respect of risk is the hallmark of the best traders.
They know if you don’t keep an eye of risk, it will set its eye on you.

Ruin is the risk you should be concerned with the most.
It can come like a thief in the night and steal everything if you’re not watching carefully.

Don’t spent all your time admiring the fancy tools in the magazine.
First learn how to use the basic ones well. It’s not the size of your tools that counts but how you use them.

Keep it simple. Simple time-tested methods that are well executed will beat fancy complicated method every time.

Trading with poor methods is like learning to juggle while standing in a rowboat during the storm. Sure, it can be done, but it is much easier to juggle when one is standing on a solid ground.

Trading is not a sprint; it is boxing. The market will beat you up, screw with your head, and do anything it can to defeat you. But when the bell sounds at the end of the twelfth round, you must be standing in the ring in order to win.

The market does not care how you feel. It will not prop up your ego or console you when you are down.
Therefore, trading is not for everyone. If you are unwilling to face the truth about the markets and the truth about your own limitations, fears and failures, you will not succeed.

Trading Quotes from Way of Turtle by Curtis Faith

Dont spent all your time admiring the fancy tools in the magazine.
First learn how to use the basic ones well. Its not the size of your tools that counts but how you use them.
Keep it simple. Simple time-tested methods that are well executed will beat fancy complicated method every time.
Trading with poor methods is like learning to juggle while standing in a rowboat during the storm. Sure, it can be done, but it is much easier to juggle when one is standing on a solid ground.
Trading is not a sprint; it is boxing. The market will beat you up, screw with your head, and do anything it can to defeat you. But when the bell sounds at the end of the twelfth round, you must be standing in the ring in order to win.
The market does not care how you feel. It will not prop up your ego or console you when you are down.
Therefore, trading is not for everyone. If you are unwilling to face the truth about the markets and the truth about your own limitations, fears and failures, you will not succeed. (more…)

Trading Quotes

Human emotion is both the source of opportunity in trading and the greatest challenge.
Master it and you will succeed.
Ignore it at your peril.

Trade with an edge, manage risk, be consistent, and keep it simple.
The entire Turtle training, and indeed the basis of all successful trading, can be summed up in these four core principles.

Good trading is not about being right, it’s about trading right.
If you want to be successful, you need to think of the long run and ignore the outcomes of individual trades.

Trading with an edge is what separates the professionals from amateurs.
Ignore this and you will be eaten by those who don’t.

Edges are found in the places between the battleground between buyers and sellers.
Your task as a trader is to find those places and wait to see who wins and who loses.

Mature understanding of and respect of risk is the hallmark of the best traders.
They know if you don’t keep an eye of risk, it will set its eye on you.

Ruin is the risk you should be concerned with the most.
It can come like a thief in the night and steal everything if you’re not watching carefully.

Don’t spent all your time admiring the fancy tools in the magazine.
First learn how to use the basic ones well. It’s not the size of your tools that counts but how you use them.

Keep it simple. Simple time-tested methods that are well executed will beat fancy complicated method every time.

Trading with poor methods is like learning to juggle while standing in a rowboat during the storm. Sure, it can be done, but it is much easier to juggle when one is standing on a solid ground.

Trading is not a sprint; it is boxing. The market will beat you up, screw with your head, and do anything it can to defeat you. But when the bell sounds at the end of the twelfth round, you must be standing in the ring in order to win.

The market does not care how you feel. It will not prop up your ego or console you when you are down.
Therefore, trading is not for everyone. If you are unwilling to face the truth about the markets and the truth about your own limitations, fears and failures, you will not succeed.

I always say that you could publish my trading rules in the newspaper and no one will follow them.
The key is consistency and discipline. Almost anybody can make up a list of rules that are 80% as good as what we taught our people. What they couldn’t do is give them the confidence to stick with those rules even when things are going bad.

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