Win or Lose: You Are A Winner Every Day

​Have you ever spent the day making trade after trade and gotten nowhere? You may have wondered why you woke up that morning, or even bothered trading that day. Perhaps there have been a few days where you've felt this way this week. It's been a hard week so far. If you aren't doing very well, it is understandable. Uncertainty abounds. On days when you are feeling unproductive, it's important to have an upbeat attitude, though. You need to lift your spirits. So what if a given trading day wasn't fruitful? Who cares if you lost money today? Take it all in stride. How can you be so carefree, you ask? Real money was lost, so how can anyone convince himself or herself to feel good? There are trading days when your rewards are tangible profits and you can bask in the glory of success, and then there are those days where you must chalk the day up to experience. You settle for saying, "Perhaps I learned something valuable today. Let's figure out what I learned and be grateful that I got something from my trading."

What did you learn today? What did you experience? Did you make it through the day relatively unscathed? That's worth something. Maybe you learned that you could stand aside when you wanted to and get out of harm's way. It is something worth learning. Maybe you jumped into the markets too soon, and felt a little bit of regret from losses. Were the losses justified? Did you follow your plan, but the plan didn't work?

If you lost because of a faulty plan, it's still valuable knowing that you could follow a plan. Losses due to impulsive decisions are another matter, however. If you traded impulsively, perhaps you learned how you might prevent impulsive decisions in the future. No matter what happened, though, you learned a valuable lesson.

In the modern, competitive world, we are obsessed with winning races. We want to make more profits than the next trader, and when we fail to make profits, we feel beaten. But the only benchmark that should matter is your own. So what if you don't make profits every single day? Maybe you do not yet have the skills or financial resources to make a profit every day. Even if you consider the metaphor of winning a race with other traders, would you try to run a marathon without the proper amount of practice? Would you feel disappointed if you couldn't reach an athletic goal that you knew would take more training than you had? You definitely would not, so why make such high and lofty trading goals? Give yourself a break. Sometimes it is wise to just do your best and accept what you've achieved. When you set high goals that exceed your skills, you will usually feel discouraged, and that may make you feel like giving up. Rather than kicking yourself for not performing up to par, consider the lessons you learned as a win, and keep on trading.