I Love Trading but not my Trades
I love trading but not my trades. Now, I know it sounds a little bit counter intuitive and possibly even illogical.
Should you love trading? absolutely on the condition that you can love your winning trades and you’re losing trades equally. But the focus of today is that I want to focus on most people have it the other way around. Most people dread trading but love their trades.
Interesting concept. (Watch Video 15 mins) They dread trading because they’re not confident, they’re not certain and they have stress around the execution and stress around the results and they judge themselves based on one trade to the next to the next. Right?
I love trading but not my trades.
Now, I know it sounds a little bit counter intuitive and possibly even illogical.
Should you love trading? Absolutely YES!
You should ALSO love your trades on the condition that you can love your winning trades and you’re losing trades equally.
But the focus of this chapter is that most people have it the other way around. Most people dread trading but love their trades.
Interesting concept.
They dread trading because they’re not confident, they’re not certain and they have stress around the execution and stress around the results and they judge themselves based on one trade to the next to the next.
Which by now in the book you will know how to deal with these should they come up for you in your trading.
If you don’t love trading it is likely because you haven’t got a tightly refined trading plan with very clear parameters around what, how and when you trade and what rules you apply.
Majority of traders don’t have that in place, which increases stress and apprehension when trading.
Not having that is a recipe for stress in trading.
Therefore, the majority of traders tend to have frustration and stress around trading.
They don’t love trading, but when they go to execute the trade, they’re totally and utterly infatuated and totally in love with it.
And how that plays out is that they sit and watch it.
And watch it.
And watch it.
And they allow it to occupy so much of time and space in their mind and life that it dominates.
That’s the point where you become a slave to trading.
If you’ve got the MT4 App on your phone, are you watching it all the time?
When you go for coffee break at work or park your car or WORSE STILL….. whilst driving…. Are you checking your trades?
Is the first thing you do when you have a free moment to grab at your phone and take a look at how your trade is doing.
So are you falling in love with the trade?
Do you become obsessed with that one trade.
You expend so much emotion on that trade.
Win or lose..
So when it loses you’re gutted.
You’re absolutely betrayed!!
Think about that from a physiological point of view.
What it does in your mind and what it does to your state.
Think about it without going too deep into the physics and neurological side of it – which I will in my next book.
It further builds up the protein around the neurons in your brain that reinforce your unsupported beliefs.
That are not ideally supporting you.
For the purposes of this book, I wont go deeper into this physics but there’s a lot of physiological evidence to show and demonstrate why that would be less than optimal behavior.
What you’re doing when you come in completely in love or infatuated, it’s like having a lover who’s let you down.
You’re gutted.
How do you recover from that?
You know when trust is broken?
That trade that you put on, put so much faith into, so much trust into and you followed it.
You’ve stalked it.
You ruled it, you’ve talked to it, you’ve shouted at it.
It’s just like having a relationship.
All these emotions you’ve gone through in the life of that trade and then it goes and loses on you.
Trust broken, faith broken, disappointment, hurt, anger, frustration, conflict, doubt, all that negative stuff.
Reinforcing the negative beliefs we have about our self and that shrinks up time horizon around our trading.
Shrinks our time horizon around our life goals and then we start labelling ourselves failures.
Or no good. Or useless or whatever.
Then when we build up a loving relationship with a trade and it wins, then it supports our values.
It supports how great we are.
Our belief that we’re good, and we’re great, and we’re going to make this and you’ve conquered the market.
It’s just like where you’re in relationship.
Where the person you’re infatuated with is supporting all your values.
Being nice to you.
Being kind to you.
Being loving to you.
Supporting you and uplifting you.
You become infatuated.
Now we all know that infatuation never lasts.
It often crashes and burns.
It’s the same with trading.
I am sure you have experienced this, you’ve got a trade that you’re infatuated with it becomes a winning trade, and you infatuate with the trade and how great you are at ‘trading’, only for the market to come along and smack you for the next trade.
And you go back into that journey again and you spin off into another emotional rollercoaster with that trade.
That’s where most people have it the wrong way around.
There is phenomenal wisdom and recipe for incredible success in your trading to build consistently, to build consistent successful months, month after month, year after year to eventually get to your goal through compounding.
It’s the small things done consistently over time where you are in a state of balance about your trading, where you love trading unconditionally and which means you embrace both losing and winning trades equally because without losing you can’t win, without winning you can’t lose.
It’s part of the whole and you are not focused on trying to separate the inseparable.
Losing trades are part of the journey, it’s part of trading.
You may go through periods of time where you don’t lose trades.
But on your journey you will and once you embrace that and you love that as much as your winning trades, then you can say you love trading more than just what you believe trading can do for you, or can get for you, your relationship with trading will become more wholistic and you’ll be more balanced in your trading when you can start looking at it from that perspective.
When you start looking at the actual individual trades as just part of the process of trading.
Any one of your trades that you may have on your account and any point and time is only a tiny little part of the process.
It’s a minuscule part of the process.
Your trading is the whole journey.
In the Tribe of Traders, we work with a five year journey, we have a number that we want to achieve in five years, so each one of our trades is just one of many trades we’ll take in that five year journey.
So, there’s no place for infatuating, resenting, hating, loving any one trade.
It’s just part of the whole and that’s why win or lose, it doesn’t matter.
Each and every trade is just part of the bigger picture.
It is not something we fall in love with.
It is not something that we watch.
So, a great mantra may be – I love trading but not my trades – to help you focus on loving trading and not the individual trades!
It’s important to understand the difference and the power it gives you.
The strength that gives you to know that you love trading.
To know that you are stress free in your trading.
To be empowered in your trading and understand that successful trading means embracing support and challenge in your trading, which means embracing the winning and losing trades.
The ideal place to get to is where you have a consistentsuccess rate.
Now on average, if I remove the months that I might have 100% success rate my annual average is about 74% and the more you have that consistency in your success rate, the more you are absolutely 100% okay and embrace the losing trades because you know that’s part of the whole.
I know I’m going to lose 26% of my trades. I’m okay with that. And having that experience allows me not to fall in love with the actual individual trades, but I love trading.
I love trading for so many reasons, it forces me to stay consciously aware of where I am at, how I’m feeling, because it’s the gift that keeps on giving and I love it because it is giving me the financial return that I would love.
I love it because it’s so quick and a skill that lasts a lifetime.
It just takes a few minutes a day and it works for me.
It’s like making money while I sleep, but remember it’s a process to get to that point and I’ve earned that right through a lot of trial and error.
And once you have taken those steps of understanding that successful trading is embracing the 80/20 Rule of Trading.
You understand the individual trades are a very small part of the whole process of trading.
Once you have very tightly honed trading plan and rules that where you don’t need to be disciplined it’s just a matter of following your rules.
That’s it.
That overrules everything. It’s just following your trading plan.
You don’t need to then be disciplined, so to speak, because you’ve got a parameters which you trade within. Makes a massive difference.
And that will stop you from watching, fretting, stressing over each and every one of your trades.
And it frees up your mind and your heart as well as giving you time to get on with your life, to make sure that you’re not the slave to trading the trading works for you.
