TheRiskBlog

It needs time, till you can make proper market decisions. You need a good portion of experience for this and you have to know what is going on in the markets. But the problem is, that even if you are theoretically right with your interpretation of market events, you still have to remain flexible.

Every trader who wants to be successful needs a set of rules he acts on – a system. Most build their system over years with growing experience, others buy one. To discover what works and what doesn’t most traders test different systems during their trading career, till they find or develop one that fits them and brings the consistent success they searched for. But it is not easy to test a system, because there is one problematic factor involved in it – the trader himself.

When people start out as traders they always have one goal. And that is to make money - preferably lots of it. People have different ideas but most often we hear something along the line: “..i want to be able to make a living trading…”, and “…i have this amount x right now but at the end of the year i would like to have doubled it…”.

Now this is all fine but how do you reach such a lofty goal? Let´s have a look at a few ways:

Blogger and Author Stanley Bing said in his recent video at Fortune, that a crisis like this teaches us many lesssons, but the problem with it is that “everyone of these lessons will be forgotten the minute this crisis is over”
Is that really so?

Equity markets have come a long way in 2009. And now everybody wants in on the move and everybody wants to own stocks since they are moving up. That describes the same situation we faced at the start of the century after Dotcom stocks moved over the edge. Sure this time the situation is different, we are in the middle of one of the worst crisis we have seen so far and it is an event felt worldwide. But that doesn´t mean stocks can go up forever.

The economy is not following nearly as quickly as markets suggest. The stock market has outperformed the real economy by far. So what do we need to do

If you tend to react like the trader in this video, you should seriously think about your tradingstyle. Trading shouldn’t be so stressful that you react like this when someone disturbs you.

When It All Goes Horribly Wrong

Investing in the markets is hard work, at least if you want to be profitable in the long run. It does not help to be lucky on your next trade, you need to be “lucky” on your next 100 trades. In order to achieve a goal that lofty you need to make sure that you keep your losses small. Idealy you always hit the exit button just below zero.

In the real world this doesn´t happen to often, sometimes because the trader is emotional, hopes that the stock comes back or just wants to keep the stock for sentimental reasons.

If you want to improve your trading substantially, then make sure that your losses are tamed. For that i have put together the 10 most important steps to do this:

Did you ever think about the connection between values, strengths and efforts - in a psychological sense – and how this can help you being more successful?

Brett Steenbarger wrote an article relating to this interesting topic in his Blog.
There, he points out, that our values represent what is important to us and that our strengths are similar to our talents and skills.

If our efforts fit with our values and strengths it will motivate us. Thus we increase our chance

Today I discovered a pretty interesting video from Michael Covel (Author of: Trend Following) about Greed. In it he wonders why this attitude is usually seen so negatively. He takes the standpoint, that greed is a good side of human behaviour. And I can only agree with this!
Cause from greed awakes the desire to achieve something. And if you really want to achieve something you have a goal and that’s very motivating.