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Forex Psychology

How to Behave Like a True Trading Legend

Whenever you think of the most successful traders in the world, who comes to mind? Here are a few quick examples of noteworthy traders with a lot of experience:

  • Carl Icahn is the richest trader in the world with a net worth of $14.3 billion. He runs an investment firm and previously advised Donald Trump on regulatory overhaul. 
  • George Soros has a net worth of $8.3 billion and is in charge of a hedge fund worth billions of dollars. He has been nicknamed “the man who broke the bank of England”.  
  • Ray Dalio rules over the world’s biggest hedge fund firm Bridgewater Associates, worth around $140 billion in assets. 

There’s a lot we can learn from these expert traders and others that have put a lot of time and effort into perfecting their trading strategies. If you want to find yourself in their place one day, then you’ll need to understand how they think and what not to do. Below, we will detail four of the best trading behaviors you should copy if you want to think like these billionaire investors. 

  • Be Confident, but Not Overly Confident

In order to be a successful trader, you need to believe in yourself and feel confident in your strategy. It’s important to maintain one’s belief in themselves even when their trading strategy fails and they have some losing trades, rather than second-guessing everything. Unfortunately, too much confidence can lead a trader to feel arrogant or as though they are invincible. Overly confident traders take more risks and don’t always analyze all of the data that they need to. This usually leads one to lose everything that they gained in the end. This is why successful traders need to be confident in their abilities and strategy while remaining humble by remembering that they aren’t invincible. 

Many traders experience anxiety and make distorted decisions after experiencing one or several losses when trading. It is important to understand that you can’t win every single time. Being a good trader is about having more winning trades than losing ones, not having a 100%-win rate. This is why professionals learn from their mistakes without beating themselves up over them. If there was something you could have done differently, remember that next time. Or maybe you made what looked like a good move and the market did something unexpected. Either way, you need to brush yourself on and move on when you make a bad trade. 

  • Know When to Do Nothing

Have you ever anxiously watched a trade and pulled out before hitting your stop loss or take profit level, only to wish you hadn’t soon after? Good traders set their stop loss and take profit levels and then sit back and do nothing. Patience is important here. It isn’t always smart to make a trade, for example, when the market is highly volatile. Good traders sit back and only enter the market when they know they should. They aren’t addicted to trading and understand that some days they will need to sit out. If you want to be like one of the greatest traders out there, you’ll need to practice patience and self-discipline so that you don’t enter the market at bad times or allow anxiety to change your decisions. 

  • Never Stop Learning

Traders should never stop pursuing knowledge about trading. Even if you become a professional, there’s always something new to discover. You need to be able to act logically when the pressure is on and may need to do some psychological work to improve the way you act in stressful trading situations. Or perhaps reading about an unknown strategy or another’s point of view on something could help you to improve your own strategy or be of some use. The best traders don’t assume that they know everything that there is to know about trading.

The Bottom Line

Successful traders have the right amount of confidence without being arrogant. They understand that they could lose but have invested enough effort into their trading strategies that they know most of their trades are going to be winners. In order to be like one of the greatest traders out there, you need to learn a lot about self-discipline and how to behave under pressure so that you don’t allow your emotions to cloud your judgment. Professionals don’t beat themselves up over their mistakes, they dust themselves off and move on. If you plan to be a noteworthy trader in the future, you’re going to need to learn to behave like one. Try following our list and reading about some of the greatest traders out there to master having a professional attitude.