The difference between winners and losers is very simple: WINNERS HAVE A STRATEGY! PERIOD. (p.s. if you're willing to trade an unprofitable strategy, you are a whole different class of loser)
I play the day that the market Gives, using my system. Other than that, I keep 60Min and 1 week chart visible. How many days have we been selling? How many days have we closed positive? Where did cash open on Monday and where does it want to land by the Friday print. (my favorite) All that keeps me busy/focused and you could say an exercise in futility since no one can possibly predict 100% what will happen next. Markets sure as hell don't do what I say but constant thinking/motion keeps you sharp - system avgs hrs in trades and that gets boring. The real difference or balance here between winners and losers is that the winner, when he is wrong, cuts bait and is able to reverse quickly. The loser will sit in that position lamenting. So it is in life, when you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Making money in the market is a process of extraction that requires the following: 1. Knowledge 2. Skill 3. Experience A "winner", to use the thread originator's term, is a person who has organized and built his mind with the three items to be at an operational level. Although there are various levels of being operational, it turns out that just a small degree of 1, 2 and 3 is sufficient to be operational itself. A "loser", again to use the originator's term, is someone who is unable to obtain 1, 2 and 3 in order to build his mind to go through the process of extracting from the market. A person starting from a scratch place approaches the market with neither 1, 2 nor 3 in his basket. That does not automatically make him a "loser", of course, because a loser is a person who cannot obtain these items to build his mind, not a person who simply lacks them. So how does a person starting from scratch obtain these items for his basket? Unfortunately, this is problematic because the person's basket is not empty to begin with. It is filled usually with items of folklore that a person has picked up as 1 while arriving at a point where he views the market as a place of opportunity for making money. Such a person may be worse off than those whose baskets are so filled with myths that the market cannot be seen as a place of opportunity at all but something to be feared and avoided. What I am stating here is that most people never have a chance to be a "winner" for the simple fact that they are in the "loser" category before they get off the starting line. Once they get started, they go through 3 in the form of failure and losses and usually obtain more sophisticated myths which they take for deeper 1 and become proficient at doing things that they mistake for 2. In short, they start out fucked and fuck themselves up further as they go along all the while thinking they are acquiring 1, 2 and 3. Trading is one of those things that if it can't be done right, it is best to not do it at all. A "winner" is someone who recognizes this and is also a person who decides not to pursue trading at all because he sees that a person cannot learn to do things right by believing in and doing things wrong. A "loser" is someone who doesn't know this.
Trading is a game like poker or chess. Trading, like other games, has rules and players. For the most part, players get the same information: all poker players can now through the net easily get odds; all chess players can easily get past games; all traders now can instantly through the net get SEC filings and government inventory releases. Both winners and losers have about the same information; thus, knowledge has nothing to do with winning. Over many hands--given a fair card deck--all players will get about the same hands. Despite getting both same information and the same hands, notice the same guys end up at the final tables. Note also the same guys end up at the top of the chess rankings. Books written about success would fill many libraries. Writers use terms like "talent" or "motivation" to describe the trait that separates winners from losers. It is a fact that reading about success indicates that you've been losing. That reading about success can make a loser into a winner is dubious at best.