Think back to a time when you had a losing trade, or made an error with
your trade execution, or had a bad trading day.
Who was responsible for the result that you got?
- The market?
- The Trading Guru You Follow?
- Your Friend whose analysis went wrong
- The trading platform you were using?
- The room you were in?
- The weather?
One of the most important factors in becoming a high-performing trader and achieving and sustaining trading success – is that you are responsible for your trading results. The results that you get in your trading are created by you.
”I am responsible for my trading results. I accept that I create my trading
experience.”How did that feel?
Have you taken responsibility for your results or have you looked to find someone or something to blame?
Understanding that the level of your trading success and the results you get is absolutely under your control, is fundamental to becoming a high-performance trader, and achieving high levels of consistent success.
It is easy to find excuses like
- Blame your trading strategy
- To create stories that shift the focus away from ourselves and onto
external factors. - Blame Global Market
- Blame Indian FM
- Blame Economy
In doing this though we take ourselves out of the learning and
development loop.
By not taking responsibility for your actions you do not enable yourself to reflect on what you did and what you could do differently next time.
Instead you are left to wait for external factors to change to get you
the results you want – you have dis empowered yourself and given control of your trading results to external factors. You are drifting on the waves of the market, with no rudder!
If you do not like the results that you are getting in your trading then there are essentially two paths that you can take:
1. You can blame the markets (and within this side of the equation I would also include brokers, etc) for your P&L. This is the easiest of the two options and I am not saying that market conditions are not a factor, or else they would not be in the equation at all. However, what we should consider is that they are not the deciding factor.
2. You can look at how you traded the market, and therefore how you created your P&L. This is the hardest of the two!
What you are doing here, though, is taking responsibility for your P&L. You are accepting that you have created the outcome by trading in the way that you have.
If you are unhappy with your results then you need to look at how you can change your trading performance until you get the results that you want.
You might need to
- Change your thinking,
- Your perception or beliefs, your mental processes
- Your trading strategy and ultimately your trading behaviors.
Your trading behavior is what you have control of – and this governs your trading performance. For more experienced traders any existing unhelpful
behaviors will be largely conditioned and habitual and this can present a
slightly greater challenge in making the required behavior changes. We need to change our trading psychology and make new trading habits