A Proper Frame Of Mind
"Frame your thoughts like this — you are an old person, you won't let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you'll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
So yesterday we touched on controlling our passions and not letting our passions control us. Today it's a similar thing but this time it's controlling our emotions rather than our emotions controlling us. Big losses provide us with emotional pain for sure, so again this links in with yesterday's post about voluntarily taking a small controlled red to protect our bank and give us long term profitability. Taking these reds on the odd occasion, keeps our emotions in check and saves the pain of losing a much bigger chunk of our bank! When in pain, we become emotional and angry and desperate to get our loss back! If we are managing our trades correctly, we are protecting our bank and we are in the correct mindset. This means that we are in control of our emotions at all times. It is vitally important as traders not to act on impulse, get angry and trade on full tilt! Everything that we are trying to achieve by following the rules and criteria of our strategies, can easily be thrown out of the window, by not taking the controlled red that we need to take on occasion. Don't let the red mist appear and let trades run if they are going against you, because we need to be trading in "a proper frame of mind" at all times. If you start to get angry, frustrated, emotional etc. then stop and take a break, because trading in this state of mind will kill your bank for sure as you start to chase losses. We simply have to stick to the plan at all times. Slow and steady wins the race. There will be ups and downs on our trading journey and it's not all plain sailing that's for sure, but eventually the penny will drop and you will see steady progress. Stick to the big three basics of patience, discipline and mindset and you won't go far wrong!