Trading on Target: How to Cultivate a Winner's State of Mind

PERFECTION AND SUCCESS

Achieving success in any endeavor is difficult enough without adding the complication of trying to achieve perfection at the same time. Anyone who has ever used a Microsoft product knows that perfection was never achieved, never even close. But Microsoft cornered the market. It got its customers close enough. And yes, it did so in a sloppy and non-intuitive way. But, it entered the market in a timely fashion. Had it waited to achieve perfection, it would have entered the race too late to win.

In trading, there is no perfection to be achieved. There is no perfect trading system, there are no perfect trades, and there is no perfect trader. Losses are a natural part of the process—in fact, you could almost say that losses are a perfect part of a trading system. The object is to limit the losses so that your gains outpace your losses. The object should never be to completely eliminate any chance of losses. This would mean that you had fallen into the Perfection Trap.