Trading often brings out the best and worst sides of our
personality, that’s why most new traders who embark on the journey end up being
fed up with constant conflict of the two and call it quits before they are able
to realize their full potential. Being confronted with bad habits you have
often battled with throughout your life can be daunting, at most times purely
annoying.
Being a young person in my twenties, I can share my feelings
of desperation to make an impact in my life which will define the next 40 years
of my working life. These early stages
of life are critical to my ability to create income potential and ultimately
ensure my financial security later in life.
I believe the best word to define this feeling is
impatience, wanting something to be completed with so you may carry on. It’s
also certain to say that I share this sentiment with millions of young people
around the world, but I digress.
I would describe myself as an optimist, seeing a learning opportunity
in every flaw. This topic made me set out thinking of ways to embrace the
feeling of patience in my trading. But how would I know how to act that way if
I didn’t have some reference to look upon as a goal to work towards. Then it
dawned on me about a time in my life when I was younger and found the rewards
of patience which I would like to share with you.
Fishing is a patient game that I can tell you from my first
fishing trip. I was 9 years old at the time and my uncle had asked if I would
like to see how to people fish. I always had a sense of curiosity since I’ve
been young so I decide to tag along.
We found the right spot at the water’s edge and began
setting up only to realize we were one fishing rod short. My uncle’s friend
decided to improvise and went into his fishing box and found a spare fishing
line which I could use to fish with. I can say now that I was more excited
about catching fish than I was about the equipment I had to use so it didn’t
really bother me.
My cousin, who is the same age as me, came along and you can
imagine what two 9 year old boys concentration span is when you have to wait
around for the fish to bite. But I was determined to catch a fish whatever it
took, so I listened in to my uncle’s friend who was explaining to my cousin and
I that patience is the skill with fishing. So we waited and waited.
After about 2 hours my cousin was fed about with it and left
his rod to go find something more interesting to do, but not me, I was
determined that I was going to catch a fish. Time started to drag and the sun
was beaming down from its highest height.
Another 2 hours and no luck, this is when I really started
thinking maybe it was best to just pack up and leave. As I was ready to go kick
the can and make my way back I noticed a tug on my line. The excitement, here
was the moment I had been waiting for, now to reel it in. It took 3 minutes to
reel that fish in, but the satisfaction of knowing that that my patience had
been rewarded felt better than any other feeling I had ever felt.
The same thing goes with trading, there will be times when
you see a potential setup coming but the confirmation hasn’t validated yet. You
wait in front of the screens for days on end until you eventually submit to the
powers of boredom and frustration.
We become so engulfed in anticipation of the price action
that we blur out the smaller more important details. We concentrate on one aspect on the chart,
hoping that if we think hard enough about it that maybe the chart will hear us
and change its course and do what we actually expect too.
Instead of simply admitting that the time for entry is not
yet we side with our more emotional side of things and begin to personify the
security we wish to trade and assume that somehow and somewhere in between this
it is conspiring against us so we aren't able to take the trade.
This is the crucial part where most of the good work goes
down the drain; the one thing humans do when something is working against them
is to turn away from it, just as my cousin had done with his fishing rod. We take our eye off the mark and then a few
days later we learn that what we had predicted had indeed come true and we
missed out because of pure impatience.
We feel a sense of deep regret by our actions and hope that
it won’t happen again putting it down to being an amateur. But is it really?
Trading has to be the most equitable field I’ve ever come across. You can have
a trader with 10 years’ experience and another with 6 months experience, both
take the same trade at the same time, yet one comes out losing and the other
gaining. What would you say if I told you that the trader with the least amount
of experience had gained from this trade? Impossible you say? Not at all.
The trader who is
most aware of his emotions and understands how to deal with them is the one who
will succeed. At the end of the day that
is what makes the difference between a consistent trader and one who simply
quits. I would like to leave you with a quote I found.
“The angler forgets most of the fish he catches, but he does
not forget the streams and lakes in which they are caught.” –Charles K. Fox
If you would like to contact me you can through my email at cadetrader@gmail.com or if you wish to
follow me on twitter and get the latest updates of news, interesting commentary
and general trends in the market, my twitter handle is @CadeTradeR if you
follow this link it’ll take you directly to my twitter timeline: https://twitter.com/CadeTradeR
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