Taking The Bite Out Of It
"To bear trials with a calm mind robs misfortune of its strength and burden."
— Seneca, Hercules Oeteus
An interesting meditation again today and if you can adopt a "calm and reasoned mind" for when you are trading, it will help massively.
Remember that we are making reasoned choices for our trades, by using the historical stats/data that we have and then ensuring that all of the rules/criteria for our strategies are fully met. This then becomes a reasoned and informed decision, based on the probability of the trade going as we expect it to.
Once our trade goes in play, we should not be stressing about what might happen. We need to stay calm, focused and "in the zone," ready to react in a heartbeat, if it doesn't go according to plan. We have to be ready and prepared for any scenario. The trade can only go one of two ways; it either goes as we expect and we get fully matched at our exit point, taking our pre-targeted profit, or it goes against us and we cut the trade short and take a controlled loss at our pre-agreed exit point.
By staying calm when trading, you will make it much easier to stay in control to be able to manage trades fully to completion, when you need to. Like I have said before in these daily journals, the majority of your trades will go to plan and you can let them run, take the profit and move on to the next one.
As long as you can react to manage the occasional trade that is going against you, your bank is protected and you will be profitable long term, as the regular profits will far outweigh an occasional controlled loss.
Quite simply, "taking the bite out of it" as traders is exactly what we need to do, so that we can become more confident and consistent in our decision making and eliminate the fear of what could happen. This is because we know what we need to do, given any particular scenario, meaning we can concentrate on making the right decisions, based on what we are seeing happen.
Keep on practicing day in, day out and you will be rewarded for your endeavours for sure. You can do it!