Impossible Without Your Consent
"Today I escaped from the crush of circumstances, or better put, I threw them out, for the crush wasn't from outside me but in my own assumptions."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
When we compare today's meditation to trading, it is all about our mindset.
If we are not in the correct trading mindset and we rush or force a trade that doesn't meet the rules/criteria for our strategies, we can become annoyed, angry and stressed, if the trade goes against us. This is entirely of our own creation of course, because we have to be patient and disciplined enough to stick to our own rules that we have created for our strategies. The same can be said of not controlling any trades which are going against us before the red becomes unmanageable. We know what we need to do to stay profitable, but it is very difficult to willingly take a controlled and manageable red! We have to pull the trigger and exit those trades in a heartbeat and without hesitation, to protect our bank and achieve long term growth. In my opinion this is the hardest part of trading to overcome.
The reaction to breaking your rules will turn to anger, and potential revenge trading, trying to immediately get back what you have lost; all because you didn't stick to what you had planned to do! STOP! Take a break until you can begin to think rationally again and have calmed down and thought things through, on where you went wrong. If you don't do this, you can dig yourself a much bigger hole to get out of and your losses will spiral out of control!
So as it states at the end of today's meditation, "the cause is within us." If you don't give yourself cause to react, then it becomes "impossible without your consent."