As long as you are susceptible to the lands of errors that are the

result of rationalizing, justifying, hesitating, hoping, and jumping the

gun, you will not be able to trust yourself. If you can't trust yourself to

be objective and to always act in your own best interests, achieving

consistent results will be next to impossible. Trying to do something

that looks so simple may well be the most exasperating thing you will

ever attempt to do. The irony is that, when you have the appropriate

attitude, when you have acquired a "trader s mind-set" and can remain

confident in the face of constant uncertainty, trading will be as easy

and simple as you probably thought it was when you first started out.

Plangcha and his attitude

I stumbled into trading and loved it like no other buisness I had been involved with before , I have got out of all other buisness I was involved in and am completely focused on trading , I absoloutly love it , its pure trading without all the clutter associated with all other buisness , I rarely wear a suit even more rarely a tie and never have , it used to raise a smile at meetings in the past but now well I can sit at the screens naked if I feel like it and the market doesn’t care a lot, smooshing engratiating myself with customers etc which I always hated with a passion is worthless in trading , if anyone asks how I do something I can be honest straight out and it doesn’t matter wether they like it or not , I don’t have to use energy candy coating anything , the ONLY think that matters is consistantly picking the right trades .

Discipline, discipline, discipline...

New patterns...

Confidence and fear are contradictory states of mind that both

stem from our beliefs and attitudes. To be confident, functioning in

an environment where you can easily lose more than you intend to

risk, requires absolute trust in yourself. However, you won't be able

to achieve that trust until you have trained your mind to override

your natural inclination to think in ways that are counterproductive

to being a consistently successful trader. Learning how to analyze the

market's behavior is simply not the appropriate training.

When you operate from the assumption that more or better

analysis will create consistency, you will be driven to gather as many

market variables as possible into your arsenal of trading tools. But

what happens then? You are still disappointed and betrayed by the

markets, time and again, because of something you didn't see or give

enough consideration to. It will feel like you can't trust the markets;

but the reality is, you can't trust yourself.

We need technique to

achieve consistency. But what technique? This is truly one of the

most perplexing aspects of learning how to trade effectively. If we

aren't aware of, or don't understand, how our beliefs and attitudes

affect our perception of market information, it will seem as if it is the

market's behavior that is causing the lack of consistency. As a result,

it would stand to reason that the best way to avoid losses and become

consistent would be to learn more about the markets.

Many of the thinking patterns that adversely affect our

trading are a function of the natural ways in which we were brought

up to think and see the world. These thinking patterns are so deeply

ingrained that it rarely occurs to us that the source of our trading difficulties

is internal, derived from our state of mind. Indeed, it seems

much more natural to see the source of a problem as external, in the

market, because it feels like the market is causing our pain, frustration,

and dissatisfaction.

These are but a few of the many

errors traders perpetuate upon themselves time and time again.

These are not market-generated errors. That is, these errors do

not come from the market. The market is neutral, in the sense that it

moves and generates information about itself. Movement and information

provide each of us with the opportunity to do something, but

that's all! The markets don't have any power over the unique way in

which each of us perceives and interprets this information, or control

of the decisions and actions we take as a result. The errors I already

mentioned and many more are strictly the result of what I call "faulty

trading attitudes and perspectives." Faulty attitudes that foster fear

instead of trust and confidence.

Trading presents us with a fundamental paradox: How do we

remain disciplined, focused, and confident in the face of constant

uncertainty? When you have learned how to "think" like a trader,

that's exactly what you'll be able to do. Learning how to redefine your

trading activities in a way that allows you to completely accept the

risk is the key to thinking like a successful trader. Learning to accept

the risk is a trading skill—the most important skill you can learn. Yet

it's rare that developing traders focus any attention or expend any effort to learn it.

More confident...