Trading will often try the patience of saints. Even patient, calm, decisive people, who pride themselves over how they’ve developed emotional control over their decision making and the measured way they navigate through their own personal lives, have been known to smash keyboards and trash their home office space, during their formative trading months and years.
Trading appears to have this uncanny ability to get under our skin, in so many ways. Failing at it initially can be regarded as an insult to our intelligence and a knock to our confidence and status. We assume we’ll be a natural that we’ll no doubt suffer a small period of adjustment, but for the most part we expect that we’ll enjoy success quickly. We’ve experienced success in other aspects of our life, when we’ve applied ourselves and utilized our intelligence, therefore we’re convinced that trading will only represent a challenge, not an impossible hurdle to overcome.
There’s nothing that can prepare us for the individual journey towards profitability, each journey is unique, every trader’s path to profitability will differ; in terms of the time it takes and the method. And the vast majority of us underestimate the how much time it takes to achieve profitability and how much it’ll cost (as an education expense), whilst we’re learning our new craft.
There is very little that can prepare us for the complexity involved when becoming an independent retail forex trader. We need to remember that our industry is still very young; in terms of trading forex over the internet, perhaps trading is only fifteen years old as an industry. It must also be countered by an allowance as to how long it took for many tutors and trainers to put together various trading manuals, offline or online.
But it’s the day to day patience skills we need to develop and keep focused on, whilst still maintaining a longer term objective. We need to develop intangible and fluid skills ensuring that we; let trades run, allow our method and trading strategy to execute trades as per our trading plan, not panic, not interfere and not become seduced by alternative and poor advice.
Unfortunately, there appears to be a direct correlation between patience and trading experience; patience develops as we become experienced, how we close this gap is one of the key issues in order to enjoy trading success. We’re also impatient to see our account balance rise, and often we make the basic mistake of believing that the more trades we take, the more profit we can make, a potentially terminal thought process for our trading progression.
There are many simple exercises that we can adopt to develop patience, however, one overall suggestion would be to simplify our trading. If we trade one only security, either on a day trading or swing trading basis, then patience could naturally develop as a byproduct. Rather than stress over several short term positions, we’ll only concentrate on the one trading position at any given time and stress and patience are often interlinked. For example; if we trade only EUR/USD, with a straight through processing electronic configured network broker, then we’ll experience less slippage, better spreads and more reliability.
Less stress will help encourage patience. If we limit ourselves to risking only 0.5% account risk per trade and develop a circuit breaker of 1% per day, then we’ll be limiting ourselves to losing two losses in series with no wins, before ending our day’s trading to patiently wait for the next day’s opportunities.
