Conquer the Four Fears to be Profitable trader Part-III

In Continuation with Previous Post
4. Fear of Not Being Right
Too many traders care too much about being proven right in their analysis on each trade, as opposed to looking at trading as a probability game in which they will be both right and wrong on individual trades. In other words, their overall method will create positive results.
The desire to focus on being right instead of making money is a function of the individual's ego, and to be successful you must trade without ego at all costs. Ego leads to equating the trader's net worth with his self-worth, which results in the desire to take winners too quickly and sit on losers in often-misguided hopes of exiting at a breakeven.
Trading results are often a mirror for where you are in your life. If you feel any sort of conflict internally with making money or feel the need to be perfect in everything you do, you will experience cognitive dissonance as you trade. This means that your brain will be insisting that you cannot exit a trade at a loss because it ruins your self-image of perfection. Or if you grew up and feel guilty about having money, your mind and ego will find a way to give up gains and take losses in the markets. The ego's need to protect its version of the self must be let go in order to rid ourselves of the potential for self-sabotage.
If you have a perfectionist mentality when trading, you are really setting yourself up for failure, because it is a given that you will experience losses along the way in trading. Again, you have to think of trading as a probability game. You can't be a perfectionist and expect to be a great trader. If you cannot take a loss when it is small because of the need to be perfect, then the loss will often times grow to a much larger loss, causing further pain for the perfectionist. The objective should be excellence in trading, not perfection.


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