When Trading You Do Not Need To Be Right

(c) Dean Whittingham 2006

Are you one of those traders who always needs to be right? Maybe you're like that in most areas of  your life. Novice traders fall into this category more so than any other level of trader. The need  to be right stems from not being able to accept criticism, and this stems from having an emotional  attachment to criticism.

Think about this for a second; Our desire to be right all the time most likely came from our earlier  years where we were taught that mistakes are wrong. The biggest problem with this way of thinking is  that there is an emotional attachment to the mistakes such as feeling inferior or inadequate.  Because of these undesirable feelings, we strive to be correct all the time.

In a lot of areas in life, including trading, this is not a good way to be. Unless you make  mistakes, and learn to disassociate any emotions to it, how on earth are you supposed to learn.  Simply put; If you associate pain with learning, you'll associate pain with the process, and in this  case the process is trading.

Examples of traders needing to be right are - holding on to losing trades, not employing their stops,  putting off placing a trade even though the criteria fits because they fear it may go against them,  which in other words means avoiding the instance of being wrong. Does any of this sound familiar to  you?

Here is a small list of ways to combat the need to be right.

1. Start of making small trades.
2. Already know that your system has to win 50% of the time. If it wins less than that then you simply need to do the opposite to what you were already doing (unless of course your risk to reward  ratios allow a less than 50% winning system).
3. Accept the losses as part of business and move on to the next trade.
4. Assess each trade whether it's a loss or a win and find out where you could have done things  differently.
5. Do not attach any emotions to your trades except for the feeling of gratitude. Remember, you are  one of the few in the world who actually has the ability to trade in the first place!
6. Allow yourself to grow with your system, instead of expecting your system to adapt to you.
7. Seek out other traders and make your self accountable, by asking them to criticize your trades.  This is very powerful because if you can stand taking plenty of negative feedback and criticism,  you'll grow and hone your trading skills far quicker.
8. Enjoy the process.....