Don’t Know What to Do to Improve Your Trading? Try This…

I want to bring forth a question that a friend of mine brought to me.

He’s an options trader who just got started trading this past year.

He asked me a question that I’ve asked myself, too, and that you may be asking yourself, as well.

He looked at me and said:

“How do you keep going?”

Like, it’s tough when you’re first starting out.

You’ve probably made some great wins, which is why you’re like really into trading now, because you know there’s money to be made. It’s possible that you’ve experienced this, but then you’ve also experienced losses. You’ve experienced days where you had an idea of how you were going to trade that day and you made a plan to yourself that you were going to follow all your rules…But then in front of the markets, you just lose it.

This happens. Over and over again.

This is the point on your journey that I want to address.

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How do you keep going?

There are going to be plenty of times in your trading career where, because you either made mistakes or because your strategy is failing, you’re going to question whether this was even a good choice to get into the market in the first place. Usually, this question comes with feelings behind it – there’s a lot of shame, maybe guilt. And fear that, “what if I just wasted a couple of thousand bucks for on something that’s just never going to happen?”

I want to share some research on leadership that I just read for one of my courses in my Ph.D. program. The study was on optimism, as it is experienced by business leaders, CEOs, and entrepreneurs.

It turns out that – no surprise, here – business leaders tend to be far more optimistic than those who work for them.

This can be frustrating when you’re working for someone who may think very highly of where the business can go and yet if you’re the one doing the work and crunching the numbers you know the reality is far more unpredictable and messy than anything that person can envision.

The text talked about how sometimes having an optimistic leader is very important because that optimism can help pull the business along, especially during tough times.fix your day trading

So if you think about your trading as your business – you’re the CEO! You’re also the CFO, the Chief Financial Officer, you are the technician – you’re kind of a little bit of everybody wrapped into one.

But most importantly, you lead your own trading business. No one else.

I want you to stay optimistic.

That’s the answer I gave my friend. I told him that, basically, you have to be a little bit delusional to keep going and to assume that you’re going to make it.

I  bring up the leadership studies because I see this in other areas of leadership, too – people who are religious leaders, people who are politicians, they kind of need a little bit of ego and a little bit of self-certainty despite the evidence, in order to plow through, keep going and not lose faith when things go wrong.

Try This Instead

So my recommendation is to keep returning to the part of you that believes in yourself – that part of you said, “I’m doing this! I’m going to make this happen!” which was so enthusiastic when you first started trading.

I want you to return to that mindset, but with a caveat – I want you to also keep asking yourself, “How do I improve? how can I learn more? what are the people who have what I want – the traders who are passing challenges, running big accounts-  what did they do to get to that place?

Of those things, what can I also do as well?

So have confidence in your ability to learn. Have confidence, trust, and faith in your ability to figure it out over the long run. You might not get immediate results tomorrow on your next trade  – you might not even get immediate results by next month. Instead, think big picture and trust in your ability to keep going.

Lastly, I’ll say that I don’t have faith without action – I’m not going to believe in myself as becoming a better trader if I just keep doing the same things over and over and over again. I want to do research, I want to learn more, I want to always be reflecting and learning from myself and my own experiences, too.

Don’t lose hope – you’re going to have a mixed range of feelings about your trades and this process, the whole way through. Even now, a couple of years in, I still have some days when I just want to have a steady paycheck, but, in the end, it’s worth it.

I have faith in you, I encourage you to keep trying, to go learn something new if you’re feeling bad about your trading (right now!)

Go out and learn something new that can give evidence to yourself that you’ll be a different trader next time with this new knowledge.

<<Want to read a FREE excerpt from “The Seven Habits of Successful Day Traders” on how to fix 8 Common trading mistakes? CLICK HERE>>