Bad Trading Day? Pick Yourself Up and Move On

Everyone in society goes through an occasional bad day. They happen to the best of us, from professional athletes to major hedge fund traders.

Bad days can appear in short spurts or can linger for relatively long blocks of time. In Major League Baseball, we watched the New York Yankees go into the All-Star break with a very disappointing record and place in the standings. This is a team comprised of the best athletes in the sport and they all realized that they were underachieving. Since the break and as of last week, the team had won 11 out of 14, and the Yankees narrowed Boston's American League East lead to seven games. They have turned around their slumping ways.

Many traders who have come to me in private practice for performance coaching have told me that they struggled to let bad days go. Losses would trigger in them images of poverty, the loss of a job and huge doses of anxiety and self-defeating thoughts about their competence as a trader. Consequently, one bad day or afternoon would, on occasion, spill over into a week to two-week stretch of digging out of a hole.

Having worked with perfectionists for so long, I have noticed that they are always the most critical of themselves for mistakes or poor performance. They don't need their desk manager, risk manager or their spouse to tell them that they are underperforming. They feel it and they realize it before anyone else. Loss or failure weighs on their minds and limits their confidence on future trades. It is hard to end this vicious cycle, but trust and faith in your skill is a good start.