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Trade Your Plan

  
  Education
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After yesterday’s close, we received an e-mail from a long-time subscriber, who asked us the following question, “When you see a position that is going against you and the market is dropping, and you are losing money on a trade, but your stop loss hasn’t been hit yet, how do you stay with the position? What is your secret? Do you pullback and look at the big picture or do you simple assume its all noise as long as it doesn’t hit that lower low? This is my biggest problem with tracking your trades and most of the time you are right in holding on.” … Because we thought our answer to his question may be beneficial to other traders as well, we wanted to share our reply to his e-mail, which was…

“The key point you stated is ‘but your stop loss hasn’t been hit yet.’ When we put on a trade, it’s like entering into a contract, so we try to stay the course and simply follow the plan. Over the years, we’ve found it’s best to stick with our original analysis because we usually plan a trade at night, or in the pre-market, without the stress of live trading. During the trading session, in the heat of the moment, there is so much pressure that we have to fight the voice in our heads telling us to sell the position when everything around is crumbling. It basically comes down to planning the trade and trading the plan…easier said than done, right? Sometimes, if you have a feeling things are going bad, and you’re an active trader, you can maybe sell 1/4 or 1/3 of the position to ease your mind. However, you must have the discipline to get back in once the coast is clear. Try to lay out a plan, write it on paper, and stick to it. The one thing every trader must accept, in order to be successful, is a loss. You must be fully prepared to lose what you’re risking. Once you accept losses as part of the trading game, the pressure to be right is not so intense.

Unavoidable Disappointment

  
  Education
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If you’re trading for emotional satisfaction, you’re bound to have lots of problems and continue to struggle, for two reasons. First, often that what feels good is often the wrong thing to do. Second, the game of trading, and it is a game in many respects, involves being disappointed fairly often.

Even for profitable traders a certain number of trades will lose money, and even the winners don’t always work perfectly or match your exact expectations.

As a trader, it’s impossible to avoid disappointment, not every trade is going to work. You get stopped out and then see the trade go on to work without you, or you hesitate and miss the move, or you exit early to book profits and watch the move continue without you.  When you think about it, trading involves a lot of disappointment. I cannot think of any other job that involves disappointment on such a regular basis. Even the most successful traders experience this. No way to escape it.

When you experience a lot of disappointment you’re going to experience a high degree of stress. And when stress overwhelms you…and by the way, stress can masquerade as performance anxiety or pressure to succeed, the emotional part of your brain will run right over the logical analytical part of your brain.  You’ll know when that happens because that’s when your rules go out the window or you veer from your plan and you take a revenge trade or an impulse trade or you freeze up and hesitate. (more…)

12 Signs of Stress for Traders

  
  Education
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Markets have been particularly volatile recently, at least for intraday traders and daytrading can create a significant amount of stress. Because our bodies are designed to adapt to stress, we may fail to realize that we are stressed out.
Here’s an inventory of common trader behaviors that may signify excessive stress.
12 Signs of Stress
1. A vivid fantasy of making lots of money today.
2. Feelings of invulnerability.
3. Eating breakfast or lunch at your trading desk.
4. Hyperfocus on price bars as they form.
5. Talking out loud to the market.
6. Bargaining with the market about an open position.
7. Cursing at the market.
8. Expressing irritation at partner, kids, pets, plants, inanimate objects.
9. Sudden urge to increase position size or frequency.
10. Canceling or moving stops for no good reason
11. Adding to a losing position.
12. Trading in your underwear !
TIP: Stress degrades decision-making. If you are stressed out, shift your focus 

Three Steps In Overcoming Trading Fears

  
  Education
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1)  Slow Down – That fight or flight response speeds us up.  Under the influence of an adrenaline rush, our thoughts race, our bodies tense, and blood flows shift to the motor areas of our brains.  When we sit still, breathe deeply and slowly, and focus our attention, we slow down the body’s fight or fight responses.  Cooling down when events heat up is a great way to stay mindful and planned.  The best way to cool panicky feelings is to keep the body in a chilled state incompatible with those feelings.

2) Treat Emotions As Information – Your emotions are either telling you about a genuine threat in the world or a perceived one.  The key is sorting those two out.  If you can stay mindful and use the emotion to trigger an analysis of the situation, you can either appropriately act on the threat or remind yourself that your reaction is more to the past than the present.  When you treat emotions as information, you go into information processing mode, not blind action mode.

3)  Rehearse To Perfection – Too often we step onto life’s stage without proper rehearsal.  Any situation that generates a threat response can be mentally rehearsed through vivid visualization.  If we can keep ourselves chilled when we imagine stressful situations and visualize ourselves acting constructively, we create new mind-body connections that eventually carry over to real life.  If you conquer a fear 20 times in vivid mental rehearsals, it’s much harder to overreact to the 21st situation that occurs in real life.

Trading Mantra

  
  Education
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There are some things we can control as traders and some things that we can not. We need to learn the difference to limit our frustration and win in this game.

We can control:
How much we risk per trade.
How big a position size we take.
What time frame we trade.
What market we trade.
Our style of trading.
Whether we stick with our trading plan or go off of it.
If we honor our stop losses and trailing stops.
How we react to a winning or losing trade.

 

 
We can not control:
Whip saws when the trend reverses on us.
Gaps in opening prices both up and down.
Headline risk.
Natural disasters.
Whether a trend continues or reverses the moment we open a position.
Whether any individual trade wins or loses.
How many winning or losing trades we have in a row.
 

 

The battle for your long term trading success is won or loss in your head. The decision to whether keep going after losing money or to quit is made at the point of maximum frustration with the markets. To keep going you have to keep positive, and keep trading. Knowing the difference between you making a mistake or the market simple not matching your style will go a long way in keeping down your stress and negative self talk. 

4 Steps to Changing Your Bad Trading Habits

  
  Education
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1. Understand the benefit of change. First, ask yourself if you need to change. Then, ask yourself what you need to change. Identify your current habits and ponder the benefits of changing them. Perhaps while trading you are feeling negative emotions such as stress, anxiety, temptation, or frustration. And ultimately, these emotions cause you to make poor, impulsive and self-destructive decisions. Write down what would happen if you were no longer feeling such negative emotions. That is, what would happen if you were able to remain calm and clear-headed while trading?

2. Dissect the proposed change and benefits. Find as many holes in the prospective change as you can. Don’t just convince yourself that things will become better if you change. Make sure the grass actually is greener on the other side of the fence. Be clear about what you want to change and how you will go about it. Write down the benefits that will take place if you do indeed change.

3. Recognize the situation that triggers your self-destructive action. Write down those all-too-familiar conditions, or circumstances, that lend themselves to activating negativity within you (e.g., all the things done, or said, that push your buttons). Also, write down how you are going to consciously recognize them during the day as they happen. Now, next to each item, write down what systems and processes you will implement to avoid letting that situation become emotional. (more…)

GEMS from :The Daily Trading Coach

  
  Education
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The Daily Trading Coach covers just about any psychology or behavioral issue  the trader may face.  I cannot help but recommend it.  There are 101 lessons here divided into 10 chapters.  Let’s dig into each chapter and uncover a gem within.

Today again completed reading this Book…Yes 5th time !!

1. The Process and the Practice:  “Confidence doesna’t come from being right all the time: it comes from surviving the many occasions of being wrong” (27). 

2. Stress and Distress:  “Thinking positively or negatively about performance outcomes interfere with the process of performing.  When you focus on the doing, the outcomes take care of themselves” (56). 

3.  Psychological Well-Being:  “We can recognize the happy trader because he is immersed in the process of trading and finds fulfillment from the process even when markets are not open” (72).

4.  Steps Toward Self-Improvement:  “Your trading strengths can be found in the patterns that repeat across successful trades” (105).

5.  Breaking Old Patterns:  “Many trading problems are the result of acting out personal dramas in markets” (133)

6.  Remapping the Mind: “When we change the lenses through which we view events, we change our responses to those events” (168)

7.  Learn New Action Patterns: “Find experienced traders who will not be shy in telling you when you are making mistakes.  In their lessons, you will learn to teach yourself” (203)

8.  Coaching Your Trading Business:  “Long before you seek to trade for a living, you should work at trading competence: just breaking even after costs” (230)

9.  Lessons From Trading Professionals:  “If you don’t trust yourself or your methods, you will not find the emotional resilience to weather periods of loss” (267)

10.  Looking For the Edge: “The simplest [trading] patterns will tend to be the most robust” (311).

And a final admonition:  “Know what you do best. Build on strengths. Never stop working on yourself. Never stop improving. Every so often, upset the apple cart and pursue wholly new challenges.  The enemy of greatness is not evil; it’s mediocrity.  Don’t settle for mediocre” (341).

Reduce Your Trading Loss

  
  Education
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Trading is an evolutionary process. Nobody can wake up being a Master Trader. Unfortunately there is no book or magic trick that can turn you into the highly profitable trader. Although the belief and the hope to obtain those skills instantly is still in place.

The statistics say that only the ones with the self-dedication and discipline succeed in this business.

The most common mistakes leading to losses:

-Trading against the market;

-No trade potential;

-No serious buyers or sellers in the stock;

-Wide stop-loss;

-Fear of loss. (more…)

The composite of a losing trader

  
  Education
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loser-traderThe composite of a losing trader would be someone who is highly stressed and has little protection from stress, has a negative outlook on life and expects the worst, has a lot of conflict in her/her personality, and blames others when things go wrong. Such a person would not have a set of rules to guide their behavior and would be more likely to be a crowd follower. In addition, losing traders tend to be disorganized and impatient.

1+11 Reasons Why Traders Fail

  
  Education
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  1. They have inadequate capitalization.
  2. They are using someone else’s system.
  3. They lack knowledge of the system’s performance.
  4. They are unable to sit through flat periods or drawdowns.
  5. They are unable to handle stress.
  6. They lack commitment.
  7. They experience drawdowns that are greater than their hypothetical testing.
  8. They override the system’s signals.
  9. Their ego prevails.
  10. Their system is overoptimized; they make additional rules to take out losing trades.
  11. They lack parameters for spike performance in markets.
  12. They lack diversification between systems and/or markets.
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