You’ll need to learn how to adjust your attitudes and beliefs about trading so you can trade stocks without fear
Confidence and fear are contradictory states of mind that both stem from our beliefs and attitudes, especially when we trade stocks. To be confident while you’re functioning in an environment where you can easily lose more than you intend to risk requires absolute trust in yourself. However, you won’t be able to achieve that trust until you’ve trained your mind to override your natural inclination to think in ways that are counterproductive to being consistently be successful when you trade stocks. Simply learning how to analyze the market’s behavior is not the only skill you need.
You have two choices: You can try to eliminate risk by learning about as many market variables when you actively trade stocks. Or, you can learn how to redefine your trading activities in such a way that you truly accept the risk and you’re no longer afraid.
When you’ve achieved a state of mind where you truly accept the risk when you trade stocks, you won’t have the potential to define and interpret market information in painful ways. When you eliminate the potential to define market information in painful ways, you also eliminate the tendency to rationalize, hesitate, jump the gun, and hope that the market will give you money when you trade stocks, or hope that the market will save you from your inability to cut your losses.
As long as you are susceptible to the kinds of errors that are the result of rationalizing, justifying, hesitating, hoping, and jumping the gun, you will not be able to trust yourself when you trade stocks. If you can’t trust yourself to be objective and to always act in your own best interests, achieving consistent results will be next to impossible. Trying to do something that looks so simple may well be the most frustrating thing you will ever attempt to do. The irony is that, when you have the appropriate attitude, when you have acquired a trader’s mind-set and can remain confident in the face of constant uncertainty, you will find that when you trade stocks, it will be as easy and simple as you probably thought it was when you first started out.
So, what’s the solution? You’ll need to learn how to adjust your attitudes and beliefs about trading so you can trade stocks without fear… but at the same time keep a framework in place that keeps you from becoming reckless when you trade stocks.
The successful trader that you want to be is something you have to grow into. Growth implies expansion, learning, and creating a new way of expressing yourself. In order to become more successful when you trade stocks, you’ll have to change. This is true even if you’re already a successful trader and are reading this book to become more successful. Many of the new ways in which you will learn to express yourself will be in direct conflict with ideas and beliefs you presently hold about the nature of trading. You may or may not already be aware of some of these beliefs.
In any case, what you currently hold to be true about the nature of trading will argue to keep things just the way they are, in spite of your frustrations and unsatisfying results. These internal arguments are natural. Your willingness to consider that other possibilities exist — possibilities that you may not be aware of or may not have given enough consideration to — will obviously make the learning process faster and easier when you trade stocks.
