How to develop patience??

Can anyone here recommend a book or perhaps a method of how one might develop patience (in the trading sense)? I have been trading stocks fulltime for quite some time now and lack of patience (esp holding onto winners) has been my one achilles heel my entire trading career. I just have an enormous urge to ring the register way too often.

-Guru (in need of patience)...

 

Trade your rules and don't ever look at your intraday P/L

 

listed,

Tough behavoir to overcome. I had the same experience. And to compound the problem, I added keeping losers too long.

What helped me was keeping a side by side dairy of what I did and what the system did. After staring at how stupid I was for a couple of months, I got better at trading the system and not my incorrect gut feel.

Good luck,

DS

 

I'll tell you tomorrow.

M

 

Good advice. Don't trade to make money or, worse, get money back. Trade to execute well and have decent entries and exits. I have always found, for myself and my traders, that when money becomes a focus (gotta make $$ back, gotta beat my weekly record, etc), there is more trading, more losing, more holding of the wrong trades and more quick profit taking. These all end up giving you the opposite result from the one you desired in the first place.

The other thing that I have come to recognize is that trading based on your trading screen alone results in impatience because everything looks like "the big move". As I watch charts more closely, I stay out of the "in between stuff" and become more patient. It took a couple of good hits this summer to recognize this and adapt. This is normal for trading.

 

I predominantly day trade futures, and usually the euro using tick charts instead of minute charts, although I would think the same thing about this. While trading I have seen that it's very easy to start looking at the last couple of bars and trying to make them significant, where as across the entire chart they are just noise and without the same relevance. I have come to look at the bars for patterns and entry timing, but try to do so in the context of what I see is more significant price points, and changing my focus to price from bars, and especially the last couple, has made me far more patient and comfortable holding trades.

 

To my way of thinking the main function of patience is in waiting for a good trade. Some people are not psychologically equipped to sit out the wiggles. I had this problem and finally came to terms with it. I am seldom in a trade more than 10 or 15 minutes. So what? Theres no rule that says you have to sit there and grit your teeth for an hour. You leave money on the table at times and other times you save money by leaving early. The main thing is be consistent and move on to the next trade with no regrets.

 

Study some books about limit holdem poker and play online on one table for a few months with the recommended starting hands from one of the books! That will definitely learn you to be patiened.

Maurice

 

well put easyrider!!... you took the words out of my post

 

try reading a book while you are trading, or work out

Thats what I do,

keep on audio alerts, to alert you when your price gets to your place, that way you don't hjave to watch it constantly.