Trading Maxims/Quotes

"...the essence of boredom is to be found in the obsessive search for novelty. Satisfaction lies in mindful repetition, the discovery of endless richness in subtle variations on familiar themes."
George Leonard -- Mastery

 

''T he ant,consider her ways and be wise;she has no overseer , no governor, no ruler,but in summer she prepares her store [of food]'' Solomon

 

keep your feet on the ground and keep reachin' for the stars.

 

“In short, you must discipline yourself, literally condition your nervous system to act automatically and unemotionally. Discipline does and will produce confidence and ultimate success.”

Robert Koppel -- The Inner Game of Trading

 

“Trading is 75 percent mental. Your confidence, which is built on your experience, composes your mental framework. Pay careful attention to these words: The only thing that matters is your own profit and loss statement at the end of the day! What do these words signify? Ego. Get rid of it.”

Jea Yu -- Underground Trader

 

“Before anyone can become successful in an environment with the unstructured character of the trading environment, one needs to develop a supreme sense of self-confidence and self trust. I am defining self-confidence as an absence of fear and self-trust: knowing what to do at the moment when it needs to be done, and then doing it without hesitation.”

Mark Douglas -- The Disciplined Trader

 

“The key to being a good trader is admitting when you’re wrong. I am very stubborn. I would never admit I’m wrong on a trade. You’ve got to be able to change your opinion 30, 40 times during the day. You’ll say, ‘I love the market,’ and get long. Then you’ll feel, ‘I hate the market,’ two minutes later. So you’ll get out of everything and get short. Flexibility is key to being a good short-term trader – that and not going for the home run constantly.”

Steve Girden -- Electronic Day Traders' Secrets

 

“Man is extremely uncomfortable with uncertainty. To deal with his discomfort, man tends to create a false sense of security by substituting certainty for uncertainty. It becomes the herd instinct. The irony is that the greater the uncertainty, the greater the similarity of predictions, as the experts, ‘shout together in the dark.’ In turn, the greater will be the collective surprise when their predictions miss the mark. The less information there is available about reality, oftentimes the more uniform the ‘conventional wisdom’ will be.”

Bennett Goodspeed -- The Tao Jones Average

 

“A speculator should never be tempted to give up his flexibility. If he gets himself locked into an investment, or deprives himself of freedom to change his mind, he is giving up his stock in trade.”

Donald Worden -- Traders Manifesto

 

Blowing stops just stopped being a problem for me since my control over myself became strong enough. Honestly, when I read about people not being able to keep stops, it always amazes me that people are talking about this problem like some outside power dictates their actions. You can see it in the trading vocabulary. People say “I made a profit”, but “I took a loss,” like this loss was given to him. But it’s not so. People make profits and make losses.

There is a moment when you realize that you are the only one who can control all this and save your money. At this point, keeping stops is not a psychological problem anymore. Let me give you an analogy. If you bought a television, brought it home, turned it on, and discovered that it didn’t work, would you just sit there and look at it and hope that it started to work? No! You just take it back to the store and get another one. The same line of thinking works with stocks. Don’t wait for anything. Just sell it and buy another one, when the right moment comes.

Vadym Graifer (threei)