Trading success does not fall into our laps, sadly. The reason is to do with our inability to recognise a few simple universal laws and follow them. Our trading psychology is dominated by our ego and this prevents us from opening up to new ideas and change our habitual thinking and our trading minds.
• What you can do now to change Mindset From Gambling to Trading
Here are a few things you can begin doing immediately to begin the transition from being a gambler into thinking and acting like a professional trader:
• Be realistic about how much money you can make given the amount you have at your disposal to trade with. Don’t put unrealistic expectations on yourself and you will be far less likely to over-trade or over-leverage your account. Make sure you can sleep soundly at night with the amount of money you have at risk on a trade.
• Begin thinking about the market as an arena for self-improvement. Understand that the degree to which you have limited or no control over your own behavior and emotion, will be the degree to which you lose money in the market. The more you operate on logic and pre-emption, the more likely you are to make consistent money in the market. You will likely notice a shift in your daily behavior and mental state in all your activities and relationships, not just with trading, when you become more emotionally controlled and self-aware.
• Start keeping a trading journal, record all aspects of your trades before and after you enter them. All businesses must track their expenses and manage their daily activities, having a tangible trading journal that you force yourself to keep up-to-date is an excellent way to keep yourself accountable and to keep your mind focused like a business person instead of a gambler.
• Model yourself after successful people…
Following the trading strategies and the mindset of a professional trader can help you greatly in making the transition from gambler to professional trader. Professional traders are much simpler than what many beginning or gambling traders might assume; if you walked into a pro trader’s office, you would not find any complex indicator-laden trading systems. The reasoning for this is simple; the industry hype is overrated and does not work, people sell trading systems that don’t work and that are over-complicated because they are not professional traders.
I teach plain vanilla price action strategies to my students because it has brought me many years of stress-free profitable trading, and I know that by adopting my professional trading strategies and way of thinking, you too can become a profitable trader. If after reading this article you KNOW that you are stuck in a cycle of gambling and trading for pleasure, then it’s time to make a shift in order to profit, after all, you cannot expect different results if you don’t change what you are doing.
If you want to learn more about successful trading and employing the power of simple price action strategies, please visit my Price Action Trading Course page here