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3 Simple Techniques

Once you sort through all the trading jargon and strategies, making a good stock trade is much easier than people tend to make it. In other words, most people make stock trading harder than it needs to be.

After all, when trading we are generally dealing with thousands of dollars per holding, so it can be easy for traders to continually second guess and put pressure on themselves before finally pulling the trigger.

Below are 3 simple techniques that will having you making good stock trades more often than not.

  1. Create an entry point – Where is a good spot to buy the stock? Based on your strategy, this could be after a breakout, after a pullback, and so on. Once you choose an entry style stick to it and use it every time.
  2. Create a failure point – This is also know as creating stop losses. Basically determine the eject button before entering the stock. Based on your analysis, this should be the price where the trade is considered a bust when it falls below that price.
  3. Create a price target – It is easy to say a stock will go up, but when do you know when to sell? Are you necessarily tying up your capital in a stock that already saw its boost? By creating a price target before entering a stock, you better utilize your capital as you collect gains and move on to the next stock.

That’s it! Yes, it is really that simple, by determining these 3 critical points, the hardest part of stock trading should be deciding how to spend all that money you made.

Continue to tweak and perfect your criteria for determining these critical points, and eventually you’ll master a surefire trading system.

3 Steps to Controlling Emotions and Gaining Trading Discipline

1. Know what you are going to do before you do it.

A Master Chess Player is at least 6 moves ahead of his opponent at every step in the game of Chess. A Master Trader identifies the market participants in that stock at that moment, determines when the next level of market participants will buy, decides a specific price for entry, and has one or more exit strategies planned for that stock trade before he ever places an order. In other words: he knows what he is going to do before he initiates the trade and has all of his various strategies worked out for all the different scenarios that can happen to that trade. He is prepared for all situations and ready to trade.

2. Develop your own unique Trading Style.

Too often traders simply follow the crowd. Instead you should develop your own unique trading style. A trading style is not a strategy. It is a set of parameters or rules that you adhere to strictly, ignoring rare anomalies that occur in your trading from time to time that go against your rules. Your trading style should also ignore gimmicks, fads, and ‘hot new strategies’ that are constantly being promoted to crowd traders. If you establish a set of parameters for your trading, write those rules down, and follow them while ignoring the crowd mentality of most small retail traders, you will begin to establish strong emotional control in your trading decisions. The trick is writing the parameters down and then sticking to those rules. Emotions want traders to ignore rules.

3. Ignore the Money.

Don’t trade for the money. Trade because you can’t imagine doing anything else. Trade because it is the most enjoyable and rewarding profession you can do. You can have a passion for studying charts without letting passion rule your decisions. Highly successful people, in any career, do not do their job because of the money, they do it because they love what they are doing and can’t imagine doing anything else. The money is secondary to doing the job that gives them purpose and self-esteem. Money is not the ultimate motivator, purpose and self-esteem are.

THE BEST OF JESSE LIVERMORE

On emotions: 

The unsuccessful investor is best friends with hope, and hope skips along life’s path hand in hand with greed when it comes to the stock market. Once a stock trade is entered, hope springs to life. It is human nature to be positive, to hope for the best. Hope is an important survival technique. But hope, like its stock market cousin’s ignorance, greed, and fear, distorts reason. See the stock market only deals in facts, in reality, in reason, and the stock market is never wrong. Traders are wrong. Like the spinning of a roulette wheel, the little black ball tells the final outcome, not greed, fear or hope. The result is objective and final, with no appeal.
I believe that uncontrolled basic emotions are the true and deadly enemy of the speculator; that hope, fear, and greed are always present, sitting on the edge of the psyche, waiting on the sidelines, waiting to jump into the action, plow into the game.
Fear keeps you from making as much money as you ought to.

On herd behavior:

I believe that the public wants to be led, to be instructed, to be told what to do. They want reassurance. They will always move en masse, a mob, a herd, a group, because people want the safety of human company. They are afraid to stand alone because they want to be safely included within the herd, not to be the lone calf standing on the desolate, dangerous, wolf-patrolled prairie of
contrary opinion.

On cash:

First, do not be invested in the market all the time. There are many times when I have been completely in cash, especially when I was unsure of the direction of the market and waiting for a confirmation of the next move….Second, it is the change in the major trend that hurts most speculators. (more…)

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