BPA trading room Q&A: May 13, 2015
When you were still learning and working on minimizing emotions, did you try to avoid excitement or feeling good about winning because, in turn, that may make you upset about losing? I’ve noticed this and was curious about your take on it.
Audio duration: 1min 51secs
Starting out trading. Getting emotional?
I wish I could be more helpful with this. When I started out, for years there would be big swings emotionally up and down, and I was constantly in an intense state of feeling. So if I’d win three weeks in a row every day, I would start feeling really good about myself. And I was hoping that it was me and not just the markets being good for the style of trading that I was doing. Invariably, if I won three weeks in a row, it was the market being good to me. I was using a style of trading that was appropriate for the market, and then when the market’s activity changed, my style of trading no longer worked.
And I used to worry about every trade — I’d put a trade on and just worry. I don’t know. But somewhere along the line, I just stopped caring, and that’s when trading became a lot easier, and it just becomes very easy to stay objective if you really don’t care, win or lose — all you care about is doing what is appropriate, and trust it.
It takes a long time to trust that it works. It takes a very long time to see that you can be consistent and that, yeah, even if something fails 40 percent of the time, if it wins 60 percent of the time and you manage correctly, you make money. Even if something fails 60 percent of the time, if you manage correctly, you make money on the 40 percent.
But in general, if you’re feeling any emotion, you’re probably feeling a lot of emotion, good and bad, and I think all of that makes it difficult to do what you have to do.
Other Ask Al emotional posts
Two early posts from the Ask Al vault on the trading emotions theme for those wanting a break from technical topics.
Beginners starting out—paralyzed
Trading and Stress
Al Brooks
Information on Al’s Online day trading room
Verygood, thanks!