Monday, November 15, 2010

10 sins to avoid in trading


Know the 10 deadly sins people commit in trading and avoid them at all costs:

1 - Anxiety

A new week is beginning, you have to make money no matter what, you have bills due and you want to take it from the market - Avoid this kind of thinking! You have to make "friendship" with the market, if you try to force it to give you money, you will probably lose instead. You need to have a relaxed state of mind and just try to surf the waves...

2 - Prepotence

Some people will start in this business, make some "easy" money and then think they are smarter than everyone else, be careful, this is the right path for a big loss, don't fall in that trap.

3 - Impatience

You have been waiting for that setup to happen, market is doing its course and is taking a "long time" to reach your levels where you want to buy/sell, so you decide your level is not going to be tested anymore and cancel your order and jump into the market just to, after 10 minutes, see the market come to your price and your order would have been filled for a much better price or you might even get stopped out and then market reverses from there... Be patient.

4 - Indiscipline

When you enter a trade have your STOP in place and don't play overleveraged you'll end up making a mistake that will give you the opposite from your desired result. Have your limits established before you enter a trade, usually you will regret you didn't do it.

5 - Instability

Don't keep changing your strategy every week, find a system that works most of the time and stick to it.

6 - Indecision

If you look too much for news you might get in doubt about when to get in or out of the market, concentrate only on major news and trust your technical analysis (once you know how to do it), trash most of the news and you will do much better.

7 - Insecurity

Sometimes you are so hungry for tips from other traders that you end up going against your own analysis and guts. Always have a plan and trade your plan.

8 - Greed

This is also about position sizing, don't risk much more than you would be comfortable to lose, otherwise you will not be able to trade correctly. Make an experiment and trade with only one car for instance... Do you see how you do much better? Now try with 100 cars... True or not?

9 - Jumping the gun

Patience is one of the keys for successful trading, wait until you see a setup you really like, you know the market offers great opportunities every single day, why risk when you are not seeing anything important going on?

10 - Negligence

Trading is a business, have well defined weekly, monthly and yearly targets and have a strategy to reach those targets. If you don't establish clear targets you will not get anywhere.

Best of luck!

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