My biggest obstacle to successful trading seems to be controlling my emotions. When I put on a swing trade, I get obsessive about it. I check the price every few minutes and if I'm not near a computer, I phone in to check the price every hour or so. If I'm up, I'm happy. If I'm down, I'm depressed. My whole day revolves around what my stocks are doing. I don't enjoy feeling controlled by the swings of the stocks I'm in. I just want to put on the trade and forget about it (with stop in place, of course). But I feel I have a better chance of winning the lotto than I do of becoming detatched from trading. Also, I find myself putting on trades that don't meet all my criteria, because I don't want to sit back and watch a stock take off that I didn't get in just because it only met four of my five critieria. I am good at cutting my loses so I never take a big hit, but I keep chipping away at my account, especially because of commissions and my small capital base. My question is two-fold: Is this something that can be overcome or should I put a fork in it and accept the fact that I am too emotionally wacked for stock trading. and Has anyone else had similar issues and overcome them? What worked for you to overcome them?
Maybe it would be useful to reduce trading size relative to your overall assets / income and later slowly incease it.
My trading size is small. Nothing that would do any real harm if I lost it all. But I don't look at it from the money standpoint at this point. I look at it as if I am in training and if I'm not succeeding, my dream of trading (with size) for a living is shot. So I get all bent about that.
Read "Trading in the Zone" by Mark Douglas. I think it is a cool book. Might help. Probably wouldn't hurt.
You are in training, but you might be obsessing over your "dream" more than the training. Re-focus, have patience, don't be to hard on yourself and work your plan.
Blue star- how long have you been trading? If you've only been doing it for 6months or less...I'd say stick with it...take a post-it note and write "patience and discipline" on it...and slap it right on your monitor.... If this has been going on for a long time I'd say you might have a problem...but mostly because you said you weren't having fun
I've been a subscribing member of this site www.innerworth.com for several months and have found it to be extremely helpful. It's addresses all the emotional limits involved in trading, in a friendly format.
How much are you paying for commissions? IB is really cheap if you trade lots of 100,200 ect. Heck, even if you only want to buy 10 shares, it is still only a $1!
On emotions and trading, here is some stuff from The Art of War for Traders... 1) Sun Tzu said that when the common soldier is strong and the officers are weak, the result is insubordination... Translation: Do not let greed get the better of your judgement 2) Sun Tzu said that if officers are strong and the common soldier is weak, the result will be collapse... Translation: Do not get so cerebral that you are ineffective