In Continuation with Previous Article How to Cure Your Trading Problems
Step 4 – Commit to your plan and commit to persistent discipline
Persistence means that you continue doing something even in the face of difficulty or adversity. In trading, persistence is a key ingredient to success. If you cannot muster the discipline to persistently stick to your trading plan and your trading strategy, you will fail to make money.
After having made your list of trading mistakes and their corresponding solutions, as discussed in the previous steps, you need to commit to following-through with the solutions.
Remember that following-through means have the persistence to stick to your plan of action, even when you don’t want to.
The traders who become successful, are the ones who enter a trade and don’t close it out at the first sign of ‘danger’. They do not let ‘unforced trading errors’ destroy their trading accounts. Instead, they work on controlling themselves, because they know that is the only thing they can truly control in the market. Whereas, amateur / losing traders are trying to control everything else, and in doing so, lose control of themselves, the only thing they really can control. This obviously ends in lost money, lost time and a lot of stress, anger and frustration.
Thus, if you don’t have the persistent discipline that trading success requires, you won’t even begin to be able to cure your trading problems or get on the path to making money in the market.
Step 5 – Stop trying to control everything
It’s critical that you understand there’s a certain amount of randomness that inevitably comes with trading. That is to say, you never know what the market is going to do ‘for sure’, not matter how certain you feel about any give trade.
Traders often get themselves in trouble by over-committing to trades because they feel ‘sure’ about what the market might do next. Over-confidence and arrogance have no place in a successful trader’s trading approach. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that if you’re naturally a bit more arrogant and ‘over-confident’ than the average person, you will probably have a harder time than usual making money as a trader.
You need to be humble, and you need to accept that the only thing you can fully control is yourself. You can control how often you trade and how much you risk per trade, those are two huge advantages you have as a retail trader, so don’t abuse them.
Step 6 – Commit to Learning a Simple yet Effective Trading Method
Many traders try trading without truly having an actual trading method, they are just trading by the ‘seat of their pants’ and entering / exiting the market in a random manner. If this is you (and you know if it is), you need to commit to a trading method, because you can’t even begin your trading journey until you do.
If one of your biggest trading problems right now is that you feel your trading system or strategy is too confusing and your screen is full of messy indicators, then the solution to this trading mistake will be learning how to trade with price action. Price action trading should be the method that you learn if you want to simplify your trading and learn how to trade from the ‘purest’ market data; price.
As you can see from today’s lesson, you need to have some structure behind your trading and you need to take a methodical approach to solving your trading problems. It would be nice if trading took little to no effort and if you could become profitable by just randomly entering the market and doing whatever you feel like, but that is not the reality of what trading success requires. Taking action by committing to a simple price action-based trading method is the first step to taking a methodical approach to your trading.
To get started, checkout my price action trading course here.