Trading Educators Blog

​Winning traders are extremely disciplined. They wisely study the markets, devise a trading plan, and follow it. They control their impulse to abandon their plans prematurely, and they don't allow emotions, such as fear and greed, to influence their trading decisions. In the trading profession, emotions often get a bad rap, however. There are critical moments of investing when it's vital to contro...

Imagine what you would do in the following scenario. You have been looking at a position for a week. You had a clear and simple trading plan: Just wait for an announcement at the end of the week, watch prices jump, and then sell. As might be expected, things aren't working as you had planned. First, no clear trend has emerged; prices are moving chaotically up and down. Second, it's been two days s...

Imagine playing tennis if the ball had a mind of its own, if it could run off to the sidelines and bounce up and down for a minute or two. Imagine a game of golf in which the ball could occasionally go off down the fairway, dance about, and do whatever it wanted. Imagine a chess game in which the pieces suddenly became worthless, or a hockey game in which the puck suddenly went against everything ...

As traders we have a strong need to want complete control over the outcome of a trade. We want to believe that if we analyze the markets long enough, we'll have perfect knowledge and we can trade to perfection. But such desire leads to wrong assumptions that can do us more harm than good. Assuming we must have control restricts our actions and reactions, and the result can be unnecessary stress. W...