I wanted to provide some additional personal insights to a blog post by Toni Hansen recently entitled “Frustration in Achieving Trading Success,” which included personal statements of similar difficulties her journey to trading success. I do recommend the entire post, but I wanted to highlight a few quotes for you: “I think that nearly every…
I recently read a few simple quotes on overcoming fear that I wanted to share: “I have not ceased being fearful, but I have ceased to let fear control me.” — Erica Jong “Your fears are not walls, but hurdles. Courage is not the absence of fear, but the conquering of it.” — Dan Millman…
Have you ever been caught in a trade and your emotions are overtaking you, causing you to make a decision based on your feelings? Was it a good decision after the fact? Typically, if we trade specifically on emotion (greed makes us buy too late, and fear keeps us in too long… or prevents us…
Once you understand how mental accounting errors can hurt trading results, it is helpful to identify patterns in your own thinking and trading which can be challenged with personal strategies. While a blog entry cannot attempt to identify and correct these errors, I can challenge you to identify your own thoughts and seek out further…
Quick: What if I gave you $1,000 to invest however you wanted right now? It’s your money now – free. Would you put it on a speculative option play and try to double it within a week? Now, ask yourself, would you be likely to make the same speculative decision if forced to use your…
As posted earlier, to achieve higher rewards (profit), you must take on more risk (uncertainty). But how do you know how to analyze your risk-taking behavior? In short, it comes from taking risk and writing down your responses – physical (sweating, increased heart rate, shaking, etc) and emotional (doubts, fear, negative thinking, anger, etc). You…
“No pain, no gain.” “No risk, no reward.” In order to achieve success and realize your dreams, you must take on risk and manage it properly, despite the biases of your previous experiences and your personality. Some of us love risk while others hate it. Assuming the right amount of risk not only is difficult,…
Do you run an internal dialog with yourself that oscillates between praise and criticism? Encouragement and discouragement? While we can’t always stop this ‘inner critic,’ we can redirect its questions from negative criticism to positive encouragement with a few tactics. First, you must identify your internal thoughts and call them to attention. What is that…
I wanted to highlight a crucial post by Brett Steenbarger at his TraderFeed blog entitled “Resilience and the Courage of Your Convictions.” In trading, there are so many uncertainties and so many “head-fakes” and false moves that true success may arise only from confidently holding your carefully analyzed (or even intuitive ‘gut’) position in the…
In his book Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits, Richard Schabacker – also known as “The Father of Technical Analysis” – wrote parting comments to naturally conservative or risk averse investors that I wanted to share. Keep in mind, these words were written in the 1920s. He states that most market students need words of…