Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Fear and Your Trading - Getting on the Right Side of the Trade

To truly be able to overcome something like fear, you have to first understand it as the unique emotion that it is. Fear, in whatever form it manifests through your trading, is the direct counterpart to greed and will end up killing any progress you've made in your day to day processes.
Think of your viewpoints on fear, at least in relation to your trading: I'm sure most of the views you have are pretty cliched and common with everyone else. Fear causes people to do stupid things and make irrational decisions. Fear controls the minds of its followers. It allows unease and uncertainty to rule your actions.

In the beginning of what is now defined as your trading career, I'm sure you feared everything - small losses, losing our hard earned savings, and even just posting a lost, period. With every win we gained the fear that the next trade would wipe out our current profits. We feared the upcoming news, or the lack of it; we feared become even more afraid. We felt fear for failure, success, and the unknown variable in between them all.
You see, fear has an unequaled power to kill our focus. If you are feeling any fear at any point in your trade, you need to stop and reset your focus. Once you regain that focus, you can restart your trading attitude from there and allow yourself to reanalyze your decisions from the correct mindset.


From a logical standpoint, you need to consider the basis of what you are trading for and why you are doing it. Is this an attempt to gamble your way to the top? Is this a plan to just double your money a few times and move to a private island? If it is, I'm afraid you'll never shake the fear because you'll always know that your expectations are higher than the level you can execute at.
If you take this like a business, you'll go miles in the elimination of your fear automatically. All businesses sustain small losses, and they are always controllable - much like you can set a stop loss and guarantee you'll never lose more than you are willing to. If you've got the courage to put it at risk, you've already overcome the fear once before and should have no reason to fall back onto it.
Even if you still don't want to treat your trading career as a career or a business, you can still take solace in the fact that each trade is just about the money. It should never be about survival or a requirement. It's not the only way you gain money, and it's not the only way to guarantee yourself true success, either.
The fact of the matter is that fear is a two pronged emotion. Fear can be good - it can tell you when you need to exit a trade to stop losing money, but at the same moment fear can stop you from making more money by closing too quickly.

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