Chapter 4
What's Your Game Plan?
By now, you have probably deduced that I find parallels between sports and trading. For me, success on the athletic field is a nice comparison to success in trading. In football, if you complete 60 percent of your passes, you are a starting NFL quarterback. In trading, if you are successful 60 percent of the time, you should be a success. In golf, controlling risk, or employing proper “course management,” will keep high scores off the scorecard. In trading, controlling and knowing your risk will keep the big losses out of your account. Tennis is a game of risk and reward, baseball has a large degree of failure that has to be managed and controlled, and soccer is also a game that requires working through little failures but takes a big trend-type move to lead to a goal.
I would be willing to wager that if athletes and traders got together in a room and talked generally about the mind-set and hurdles each has to go through to be successful and how they solve the mental challenges, the similarities would be startling.
The last chapter introduced a mission statement for all currency traders: “To make the most money with the least amount of risk.” Using another sports metaphor, now the ball has to be moved farther down the field to refine how the mission will be accomplished. It's time to develop a game plan to go with our mission statement.
EVERY MISSION STATEMENT NEEDS A GAME PLAN
A football coach might have as a mission statement, “To win the most ...
