On the outside, trading looks pretty straight forward, you just guess whether the markets will go up and down, easy right? That is the view that a lot of new traders have, it isn’t until they actually get into trading that they come to realise how much there actually is, and learning it is a full-time job.
When you first get into trading, it is hard if not impossible to understand all the information that is being thrown at you, and every day new patterns or ways to analyse the markets are coming to light which makes it a never-ending learning process. Plans that have been created can be made obsolete a few hours later due to a single bit of news, things change within the markets and it can frustrate you, but the key to being a successful trader is overcoming those stresses and adapting to the markets.
When your plans aren’t working and things are going against you, it is often the case that you need to make some decisions, and quickly. This creates an additional time pressure that you really do not need. Do you stay with your current plan or strategy, or do you need to make a new one? Each second that you wait is the situation moving further away from you, it can feel that there is too much information and not enough time to process it.
In order to overcome this, or at least some of it, it is good to look at yourself and see how it is that you actually perceive your time. Sounds like a strange thing to say, but when you are in that panic mode, everything seems like it is moving 10 times faster than it actually is, your thoughts are racing but you aren’t actually coming up with any solutions, in order to combat this, you need to regain the structure that you had before things went wrong.
A way of doing this is to actually have several plans at the same time, have a plan for one market conditions, a plan for another and so forth, this way, no matter what happens you have a plan and know exactly what to do, this won’t prevent losses, nothing can, but it is at least a way to give you a structured guide on what you need to do when certain things happen within the markets. Simply refer back to the most relevant plan rather than panicking and struggling to adapt.
Doing this will make you feel that you are back in control of your trading, it will alleviate a lot of the stresses and you will feel far better for it.
