Trading is quite an adventure. While there are great days, there are also days where you feel like you are living in your biggest nightmare.
In this post, I’d like to share some advice; offer a few words of wisdom.
This is a spontaneous post, so I’m writing off the top of my head, and hopefully, it’s all cogent.
Here’s 50 Things Every trader Needs To Hear.
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- Don’t make trading decisions when you’re emotional. If you do, you’re asking for trouble.
- A major breakthrough happens the moment you stop being so emotionally involved.
- If you blame the market for your results, don’t expect to improve your game any time soon.
- Approach stressful situations as a challenge rather than as a threat. We are compelled to overcome challenges, so this little cognitive reframing will trick your mind into thinking that.
- Never compromise on risk management. Smaller losses are much easier to take and manage than larger ones.
- Be more frugal. You don’t get rich by spending more money than you earn. You get rich by hoarding it.
- Have trust and confidence in your strategy. Without that, trading is nothing but a losing proposition.
- There’s no place for superstition in trading. Keep an open mind, and the market, luck, or fate, won’t seem to be working against you.
- Aim to reinforce your discipline, patience, and execution a little bit daily, no matter how small that progress is. (Maybe start rating those on a scale of 1 to 5.)
- Seek the company of people who lift you up instead of dragging you down, who help you understand yourself, who help illuminate your path…
- Surround yourself with people who will challenge you in the right ways.
- Complain less, appreciate more. (There’s always a reason to smile.)
- Be reasonable in what you expect. In fact, don’t expect, just show up.
- Don’t let ego sabotage your progress.
- Trading isn’t work if you love it. It’s just an opportunity to immerse yourself in one of the many things that give meaning to your life.
- Read something every day. (The insights of others can enlighten us greatly.)
- Write in your journal every day. (Connect the dots and come up with your own insights.)
- Try to take the time to look at and appreciate the smaller things that make this game so fulfilling.
- You lost money today… Okay, fine. Try not to worry too much. Money is just something you need in case you don’t die tomorrow. So, enjoy the present moment and take it one day at a time. As long as you’re alive, you will always have another chance.
- Be quick to forget losses, but never forget what they teach you.
- In trading, luck can rule the day over a few trading sessions. That’s why it’s important to make trading a lifetime game instead of a get rich quick scheme. It’s all about the long haul.
- Trading is a game of inches. Learn to meditate; sleep more; eat healthier; exercise… those little details count enormously.
- Understand that money is simply a tool. Don’t obsess over it. Focus on deploying it well.
- Use social media to learn something, or to do good. Don’t waste your time arguing with people or comparing yourself to them. You have better things to do, trust me.
- Your rules and process need to become top priorities, so that you’re always laser-focused on them, no matter what the market does.
- Both favorable and adverse events come in your life as lessons.
- Learn to be content. Appreciate what you already have. Inevitably, you’ll pour that untroubled state of being into trading.
- You might not control what the market does, but you have control over your choices. So, choose to stick with your process, no matter the circumstances.
- The market can be summed up in two words: It changes. So your immediate goal as a trader is to become highly adaptable, someone that flows with change instead of resisting it.
- If you want meaning in your life, tie it to a goal that’s difficult to achieve, and keep striving.
- The market is there to show you some harsh truths about yourself that you must come to terms with.
- Don’t make your happiness be dependent on trade outcomes. You must try to be happy within yourself, right where you are.
- Your perspective is very important. Whatever you really, really want, you get. Whatever you really, really don’t want, you also get. Because whatever you’re focusing on, you pull these things into your life.
- Working hard doesn’t mean you are productive. And being productive doesn’t mean you are effective. Learn to work smart.
- If fear rules your trading, reduce your size. You’ll have all your time to make money. Learn to handle yourself first.
- In the short term, the market will do what it does best: shake the most amounts of monkeys off its branches. If you can focus on making money overall (over many-many trades as opposed to this day, this week, or this month) and organize your life and finances around that, you’ll do very well.
- Trading requires a complete reshuffling of how you think and approach your life. If you’re stuck in a particular way of thinking your whole life, you’re not going to get anywhere. You have to want to improve yourself as a person.
- In many ways, direction and consistency is so much more important than speed. Many end up nowhere by trying to get somewhere fast.
- There are so many variables behind price action that you must realize that your analysis and predictions will inevitably fail.
- Get comfortable with failure. Don’t bring ego into this and take things personally. Learn from failures. Try again. That’s the secret: You keep trying until you hit something.
- In trading, sports, poker, [you name it], most players begin to mentally check out when they’re either winning or losing. Interestingly, Michael Jordan once said that he always imagined the score to be 0 to 0. Even if his team was winning by 50 points. A winning player always maintains a certain balance in his/her mind.
- If you get discouraged, go back to the big picture. Why you started in the first place. That’s how you get through.
- If you’re a beginner, be patient and relaxed with yourself right from the beginning. This is how I would approach my trading journey if I could do it all over again.
- If you’re a beginner, understand that you won’t be a beginner forever. Your years as a beginner are the most formative ones. The experiences you’re going through will stay with you and shape up the expert you’ll eventually become. So, embrace the stage you’re in and focus on doing things well.
- Trading is 1% theory and 99% practice. No matter how many books you read on it, you will never get to do it successfully until you’re in the field, getting your ass kicked by the market and learning along the way. No book or course will really teach you that because you need to experience it yourself.
- Work on your mindset. Stand out from the crowd. Everyone knows how to read charts. Anyone can call him/herself a chart analyst, but consistently profitable traders are few and far between. You can’t learn a few chart patterns and call yourself a trader. It doesn’t work that way. You need a set of mental skills that most people aren’t dedicated enough to developing.
- Whenever you’re hesitating to put a trade on, just remember that, win or loss, this is a crucial piece of experience that you need to develop into the trader you wish to become.
- During a winning streak, the moment you become complacent is the moment you’ve lost your mental edge. At all times, you must maintain a level of assiduity that keeps you on track.
- The market sums up perfectly the realities of life. There are both favorable and adverse events; good and bad days; uncertainty … for this reason, good traders develop a certain philosophy of life. This philosophy helps them weather the ups and downs; it reminds them that there is no perfection; that everything is in constant motion, and that good things happen to those who dare to play.
- Often, people do pretty well in paper trading. But in live trading, all hell breaks loose. This is proof that the predicament is fundamentally a mindset one. Since it’s real money, it’s so easy to become results-oriented and bang your head against the wall when things go wrong.
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