Gaining Experience

Not every trade is a winning trade

One of the most difficult obstacles for newer traders is to overcome that they need to be right all of the time.

A professional trader has usually taken enough lumps to learn the reality of life in the markets: you are bound to be wrong some of the time.

Being wrong is nothing to be ashamed of. More experienced traders learn from their mistakes and realize that, with diligence and research, the next winning trade may be right around the corner.

A winning trader focuses on his losing trades, while a losing trader focuses on his winning trades.

Learning from past trades

Almost any person can make profits in the financial markets, but very few people in the world can consistently hold onto those profits. As mentioned above, winning traders often think and talk about their losing trades but they also don't get angry at themselves for those mistakes. Rather they think through the process of booking that losing trade. A trader will ask himself: Did I exit the trade at my pre-planned price? Did I miss something in my analysis that caused me to initiate a doomed trade? Did the trade eventually go in my favor? If the trader can find nothing wrong in the process before the trade was realized, then there's often no reason to be upset. If he or she controlled risk properly and learned from the error, the next trade is that much more likely to be a success.