I have a serious problem: I don't take a loss

smilingsynic · Sep 1, 2009

Quote from volente_00:

I slightly disagree.

Losing small is a necessary part of winning: if one is not willing to lose small, then in the long run one cannot win big.
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Hi, Vol

Agreed. You said it better than me.

Small losses are necessary; large losses start off as small losses that are left to grow.

satchel · Sep 2, 2009

Quote from FB123:

If I may offer you some advice: you are trying to "force" yourself to take small losers and honor your stops, because your logical mind knows that this is the right thing to do - however another part of your mind clearly doesn't believe it.

If you think about it, the only reason you need to "force" yourself to do anything is because something within you doesn't really believe that it's necessary - hence the internal conflict. Deep down you really haven't fully seen and understood the reasons why small losers are necessary, even though your conscious mind knows it.

The solution is not to force yourself to take losers, the solution is to eliminate the desire to be right on every trade. Ask yourself this: do you have to stop yourself from taking a knife and jabbing it into your leg every day? No? Why not? Because you have accepted on a mental AND a gut level that this activity is detrimental to you, so you don't do it. In fact, it is so ingrained for you NOT to do this, that you never even think about it. I bet you could have gone the next 20 years of your life without even thinking of something like what I described, if I hadn't just brought it up.

In the same way, you need to really see and accept on a gut level that not taking small losers is incredibly harmful to your account. It's not enough to believe it on a mental level, you really have to believe it deep down. Think of your small losers like you would think of health insurance - it's a small cost that you pay every day to avoid disaster. You wouldn't want to live without health insurance, right? Most people have health insurance, and most people never fully use it. But what if you need to? It would be a disaster not to have it. In the same way, most of the time not taking stop losses will be rewarding by giving you back your money when the market returns to your price, but the few times you really need it, you're going to regret not taking that small loss.

Statistically you are 100% guaranteed of failure if you don't take stop losses. No trader in the history of the markets has ever failed to blow out his or her account if they kept trading consistently without stops. So if you think about it, not taking those stops is essentially guaranteeing that sooner or later you will lose all your money. Why would you want to enter a situation with a 100% chance of failure?

If you think of it that way it might help.
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with good guano like this and there is more, why was this thread placed in chit chat? helpful to trading community.

yet there is a thread called how to be a guru in 10 easy steps that has been hanging around the front page for days now...instead of chit chat. how is a thread like that helpful or be the subject of a search query.

FB123 · Sep 2, 2009

Quote from satchel:

with good guano like this and there is more, why was this thread placed in chit chat? helpful to trading community.

yet there is a thread called how to be a guru in 10 easy steps that has been hanging around the front page for days now...instead of chit chat. how is a thread like that helpful or be the subject of a search query.
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Thanks for the comment. This thread was placed in chit-chat probably because the mental retard named BPtrader who is now on my ignore list started acting like a total douchebag and pissed everyone off. He basically started acting like he knew how to trade after posting in multiple places over the past 9 months (including this thread) that he has all kinds of problems and can't cut losers. Then all of a sudden, it was all an act and he was some kind of superstar who had all kinds of wonderful wisdom to impart, which of course he never bothered to actually share because we're all too stupid to understand his brilliance.

For some insane reason, he seems to think that anything that sounds like standard trading advice must be wrong, because it's been quoted so many times and is generic. I guess it hasn't occurred to him that some of it has been repeated a lot because it's right.

Read through the thread, you'll see what I mean... it got a little heated, so that's why they probably moved it.

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I have a serious problem: I don't take a loss

smilingsynic

satchel

FB123