Alden Cass
1. Enhance your mental perspective: Remember that it is not where you start that counts. It's all about the end result of your long-term process. The bottom line represents how well you did on the whole at the end of the year, not how well you did on a particular day, week or month. Perfectionists tend to obsess over each failed trade or bad day. The key to improving as a trader is to accept loss and failure as a normal part of the game.
Daily drill: At the end of each day, force yourself to think about the bigger picture by visually going through a calendar. Use this as a visual cue to remind you that one bad day of trading will not determine the outcome at the end of the year. 2. Take inventory of your trades: It is impossible to learn from your mistakes if you aren't aware of them in the first place. New data points and ever-changing market moves can impact your trading strategy on a daily basis, so it is important to keep a log of the trades that have been working for you as well as the ones that have gone against you. Daily drill: Create a log that accounts for all of your successes and failures. Peruse your executed trades for the day and examine which sectors or types of stocks do not seem to be consistently behaving in a rational or logical way (or at least a way that you understand). Keeping a daily trading log is a great way to objectively see where you are hot and which stocks you should be avoiding, because you are not reading them correctly. 3. Know when to walk: To survive these irrational and uncertain markets, it is important to be optimistic, but not irrationally exuberant. Many young and inexperienced traders and investors continue to hold positions that they feel "married to" because they are just too overconfident. Trading from a stance of overconfidence can end in pain. As individuals with perfectionist tendencies, they feel a strong need to be right on every trade. On the other hand, the best traders do not deny reality and accept being wrong as a part of "the game." When they see a problem, they move on with their next trade. Most importantly, they rarely make the same mistakes twice. So as soon as you recognize that a market strategy or theory of yours is flawed, it's important to get out of it quickly and admit defeat. Daily drill: Keep track of each of your trades this week, taking special note of your initial prediction, the data points that led to the trade and the outcome. As soon as you notice you were wrong, get out of the trade. Sometimes, writing down your trades and their outcomes and seeing them on paper can help you remain disciplined and in touch with what's really happening in the market.
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