The market does not care about your opinion and what you think it ought to do.  The market cannot be tamed, placed in a box, or coerced into your way of thinking.  The market does not care about your technical analysis based on past history not does it care about your projections for the future.  The market does not care about this edge or that one.  The market does not care about what I think, about what the most popular flavor of the month guru thinks, or what the latest ANALyst on Blue Channel thinks.  The market does not care about your dreams, goals, and aspirations no matter how well grounded and planned.  The market does not care about the latest economic news.  The market only cares about the present. Remember this the next time you get into a trade believing, hoping, and praying that it HAS TO WORK.  The market does not care if it hurts you, so if you choose to believe, instead of see, what is right there in front of you, then that which you fear the most will come to be. I am not alone when I say this.

“Professional traders make good risk/reward trades and are not concerned with the outcome.   Nor are they under the delusion that they really know where a stock or the market is headed.  Those who will be pushing paper around at some dead end job in the near future are new traders who trade seeking to fulfill some narcissist need to be correct.    Or smarter than the market.  Or your trading neighbor.  Or a friend.  Get over yourself. You have no idea where the market or stocks are really going in six months. All there is are favorable risk/reward trades to make with the outcome uncertain and controlling your risk paramount.”

“This is one of the paradoxes of trading and investing: you need distinct views to put your money at risk, and you need to persist with these views in order to ride winners. At the same time, you can’t become married to these views; you need to quickly revise and even abandon your outlooks in order to limit losses. We can trade and invest for ego needs, and we can trade and invest to make money: over the long haul, we can’t do both. It takes a strong ego to formulate and act upon one’s ideas; an even stronger one to step back from those ideas in the face of non-confirmation.”

“Most people, let’s face it, must be right. They live to have other people know they’re right. They don’t even want success. They don’t even want to win. They don’t want money. They just want to be right. The winners, on the other hand, just want to win.”

“Life happens when you’re making other plans. This is true and no matter how much we visualize future success, set goals and create plans for achieving them, there will be things that happen over the course of the coming year beyond your control that will impede, slow, stop or even reverse your progress. This is to be expected and, if at all possible, planned for. Frequently the difference between success and failure is being able to accept those challenges head on as they occur and keep working toward your goals even when you experience complete failure and hardship. Anyone who has achieved anything worthwhile has failed in doing so, if not many times. But, that’s part of how we grow and get better.”

“The less I cared about whether or not I was wrong, the clearer things became, making it much easier to move in and out of positions, cutting my losses shot to make myself mentally available to take the next opportunity.”

If you enter a trade and the stock doesn’t go the way you predicted, go ahead and take that loss immediately. Don’t sit their like a twit and try to justify a bad trade as you lose more money, dump it. Move on. Forget the need to be right.”

“In reality, the market puts us in a contest with ourselves.  Until we let go of the false ideas of what makes the market tick and simply respond as the market unfolds, we will continue to be punished.”

The degree by which you think you know, assume you know, or in any way need to know what is going to happen next, is equal to the degree to which you will fail as a trader.