If you've been hanging around the last while in the markets you definitely have had a bumpy ride of late. There has been much concern around the Fed raising rates with much scrutiny going into every word coming out of their camp at the moment. Added to this is the Greece debt crisis...again yes what would a pullback be without a bit of drama.
I must admit that from a personal point of view I have buried a considerable amount of time into managing my positions and being extremely attentive to the moves which have materialised. What you don't realize at the point of departure from the existing easy flowing, complacent emotive driven market is the real work as a trader is just about to begin.
I think there is always a staunch expectation that trading as an activity is effortless requiring the least amount of attention and maximum enjoyment from the profits you reap. Although I'd go to say that when markets get moving in the direction of your bias they shift so quickly that you feel that it required minimal effort to execute, the real fact is that these occurrences happen but with less frequency than what is being portrayed.
This is really important concept to accept if you're going to succeed as a trader. Most of the times the market is going to motionless or so it feels like it. When it gets moving it does so with much ease that the movements feels invincible until it decides to do an about turn. That hideous feeling of knowing you had those fat profits in your hot little hands and you've let it slip away.
I had a situation a few weeks ago when a group of traders I interact with were all relating their feelings of how the market had been demolishing their profits. Bear in mind we had just come off a market which had an extended run with little effort in picking a winner. They had become so accustomed to winning that losing was made to feel unfair. It definitely started picking at their confidence and this is when I decided to lift the morale a bit, I mean thats what trading mates are for right?
The message I was trying to get across is that no matter what we think, the market goes where it wants to go, does what it wants and there's nothing we can do that will change it. The only thing we are in control of is our trading plan and the way we execute it. Furthermore this wasn't going to be the only time in which we will experience these conditions and certainly not the last and if we are to call ourselves traders we need to use every skill we've learnt throughout the years to defend ourselves from the drawdown on our profits as much as possible. If we had made it this far in the game we surely had already proven to ourselves that it is possible to do it so what makes this time any different.
There's always going to be a certain amount of work required to make something work and for a trader that starts when the market starts to play up and gives you the feeling of fear. If you aren't disciplined you going to get hurt especially when the time comes to make those critical decisions. One way we become ill-disciplined is through the hypnotical belief coming from the market itself. If we allow that to control our mindset we effectively allowing the market to take ownership of our decisions.
We already know that we have no control of the market so why would we allow it jeopardize our trading plan ? Simply because we've been led into the belief that it's easy and shouldn't require work. Unfortunately if you've been misinformed with this belief you've missed the real learning opportunity. Trading is broken up into many different parts which we need to work on in order to succeed, Winner is one of them but not all.
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
