The Most Important Skill That Money Can’t Buy: Self-Discipline

This is the last part four of my four part series. The biggest mistakes traders and investors make which costs them time, money and usually self-confidence when trading are laid out in in the information below.

This last mistake is the by far the biggest and hardest problem individuals have. Believe it or not, the best way around it is with the use of algorithmic trading strategies which trades for you simply because we cannot mess things up. This is one of the reason automated trading has exploded in the recent years.

The Four Biggest Mistakes

1. Lack Of A Trading Plan – Part I
2. Using To Much Leverage – Part II
3. Failure to Control Risk – Part III
4. Lack Of Self-Discipline – Part IIII

Mistake #4 – Lack Of Discipline, this silent killer is in all of us!

Over the 16 years in which I have been trading and investing, I have never found a person who has not had discipline issues in their trading career. The brutal honest truth you likely do not want to hear is that you will never succeed at trading if you cannot follow a proven trading strategy and all its rules over and over again.

While some individuals just don’t have enough discipline to trade, most of us fall victim to fear, greed or our ego causing us to break our trading rules and do silly things with our money or open positions.

Lack of discipline is failing to do what you should do in a given circumstance when trading your strategies. We all know how easy it is to break rules from time to time because our gut feeling is so strong against what our trading strategy is doing but it is a huge mistake to intervene.

How to Avoid Your Lack Of Discipline

There are only three ways that will only help reduce (not eliminate) your lack of discipline.

1. Lose enough money that you now respect the market.

2. You have taken the time to think, create, and test a proven trading strategy that trades within your market philosophy and risk levels. I talk about this in great detail in my book “Technical Trading Mastery – 7 Steps To Win With Logic”.

3. You either automate your trading strategies or subscribe to a Automated Trading Strategy that removes you from the equation.

An interesting way to think of trading is not think but react.

The key to defeating your lack of discipline is to create and trade a system that is very simple to execute. And you must have 100% confidence in the system so you do not step in and alter its trading decisions. The key is to react and execute trade first with your proven strategy, and then once you are done you can think about what and why things did what they did all you want.

The last point I want to make, is that if you have your own system it is crucial that you are not tinkering with it all the time. If you keep tinkering with it, then you will never truly know how well it works thus you will second guess its activities and remain an un-disciplined trader.

Four Biggest Mistakes Series Conclusion:

My primary goal of this series has been to show you that there really is only one person who can control your success or failures in trading along with everything else in life. That person is you. In the end you are responsible for everything you have done.

The most common pitfall traders fall into is that when something goes wrong, they blame the market for the loss and not himself.

The key in trading is to accept that you will have losing trades and understand that it is part of this business. And when you lose a trade be sure not to allow these bad experiences have a negative effect on subsequent trades.

So the next time you find you self contemplating breaking a trading rule that has proven to work well over the long run for you, know that if you fall off the discipline train you will instantly be categories as one of those 90% of losing traders kind of guy.

I hope that his series has helped you. If you missed the previous parts, scroll up and use the links within this article near the top for Part I, II and III.

Here are some important resources for conquering these four biggest mistakes:

1. Read my new book “Technical Trading Mastery – 7 Steps To Win With Logic”

2. Take the Trading As Your Business program

3. Complete the Trading System Mastery Program

4. Build your own Automated Trading System with RIZM

5. Or review my All-In-One Automated Trading System

Chris Vermeulen