The Truth About Day Trading Stocks: A Cautionary Tale About Hard Challenges and What It Takes To Succeed

CHAPTER 4

From Impatient to Cool, Calm, and Collected

 

 

 

Your-day trading performance is the result of your patience, or your sorry lack thereof. No matter how well-schooled you’ve made yourself in the technical applications, if you’re short on that virtue, you’re in big trouble.

Impatience is a threat, and it’s constant. As an amateur you’ll sometimes feel edgy, no matter how determined you are to stay cool. You’ll have to chase down your impetuousness, and catch it and totally stun it, and lock it up tight with the greed.

No matter whether you’ve traded for a dozen years or mere days, your level of self-discipline is crucial. In pondering that fact I’ve come to understand that patience, when seen as an emotional tool, actually divides into two: the tool of amateur patience and the tool of professional patience.

The beginner’s need for patience is simple, yet challenging. For him or her, it’s all about staying power. He’s a lot like a determined new dieter, trying to stick to a stringent way to eat.

Impatience, in amateur day traders, reminds me of the foolishness of dieters taking the easy way out. They might get tummy tucks, or have their stomachs stapled. Are they doing anything, or learning anything, that will consistently keep the weight off ?

And the ones with the tummy tucks? If they haven’t learned to successfully diet, then they just keep on overeating—and all that surgically tightened-up flesh begins, once again, to swell and bulge and droop.

In the effort to conquer ...