February 9th Chat: Individual Issues and Perspectives

10 Feb February 9th Chat: Individual Issues and Perspectives

Trading is a frustrating skill to learn. Often times, just when we think we are able to finally stand up after crawling for a while, we get pushed down and back to a crawl. This is true for anything worth learning. Isn’t it?

What is worse than this is to have our own attitude and individual attachments to being right, winning, money and other things stand in the way. It is hard enough to overcome the natural obstacles we confront as traders. However, many who have been beat down succumb to one or more of the following:

• a negative attitude towards the market or the product we trade
• a victim’s perspective that makes us look for and always find that we have been robbed by getting stopped at the high/low tick or we didn’t get our fill
• a resentment towards others who are showing progress and signs of success when, in fact, it is a gift to see someone else succeed because it reinforces our vision that this can be done…another form of victim-hood
• a loss of control and a gambling mentality: “If I’m not going to make it, I might as well go out with a bang!”
• a mental obsession with deflecting our issues towards something outside of us such as insufficient equity in our account, poor data, poor tools, poor office space, a negative relationship with someone, a bad horoscope or whatever. This results in the thought that starts with “if only [I could…someone would…I had] something that we don’t have right now” or “soon there will be this or that”

The core of these issues is what was covered in Webinar 3. Notice that we always go back to this particular Webinar. It really is key to so many barriers to consistency.

The chat session we had yesterday is about this issue. Several emails and comments on the #FT71 Twitter stream instigated this conversation. As the market range compresses and trading continues to be one-way, more and more people are following into this trap.