Musings of an enquiring mind

May 24th, 2018, 06:13 AM

Eric Greitens former navy SEAL:

Those who are excellent at their work have learned to comfortably coexist with failure. The excellent fail more often than the mediocre. They begin more. They attempt more. They attack more. Mastery lives quietly atop a mountain of mistakes.

Something to consider when all you want to do is quit.

May 29th, 2018, 09:56 AM

The problem:
Trading is uncertainty.
Uncertainty causes anxiety.
Anxiety is perceived as a threat to your safety especially when you have something to lose.

Every trade you enter has an uncertain outcome.
You will feel some level of anxiety.
If your trade moves to profit, the gain you have made is something you might lose.
You will feel threatened.
You coping mechanism is to close out early to avoid giving up your gain.

The why:
This cascading thought pattern is something you have no control over. The trigger is your perception of the trade but the rest of the deluge is automatic. Experience this enough times and you might start to feel like you are incompetent and a feeling of depression and hopelessness starts to set in. This is all part of the original thought cascade. By seeking to avoid your loss you have prevented yourself from winning.

How does one deal with this?
The first step to overcome this crippling habit is to realise that you are free from the self imposed burden of responsibility. The patterns are simply an automated sequence of thoughts and feelings reacting to each other - nothing more than a necessary set of responses which we all inherit. It might save your life one day but it will not make you a better trader. Things I have found which enhanced my trading experience and results:
1. Seeing every trade as one of a series of trades is one very powerful technique.
2. Not watching the trade as it progresses.
3. Knowing your edge and believing it.
4. Scaling trades. Start small so that when you are wrong it is simply cheap payment for fresh information. When you are correct you press hard.

Source: Its my own paraphrased version of something I read by Brett Steenbarger. I don’t recall the article because I read a lot of stuff and write a lot of stuff in my diary but don’t keep a track of exactly where it all comes from.

May 29th, 2018, 12:05 PM

Just to elaborate on my last post. Something

Floored, But Back On My Feet!

Yuri57

as bacon would say (robert, not kevin), the grind is taken. as a short-term trader, you get "satisfaction" on a more predictable basis, but you pay a price (risk premium) for the comfort of a higher frequency of gains; that is smaller …

Musings of an enquiring mind

Discussion in Psychology and Money Management

Musings of an enquiring mind