How To Keep Your Emotions In Check While Trading

How To Keep Your Emotions In Check While Trading On their way to becoming market masters, stock traders go through different stages. One of the hardest things to learn is how to trade without letting your emotions get in the way. You can be good at picking stocks and managing risk and still fail as a trader if you can't keep your emotions in check. When you know how to control your emotions, you can be patient with your winners and not at all with your losers. Even though it seems easy to say that you should stick to your trading plan, it is actually much harder to do so. Most of us have strong feelings about money, which makes it hard to stick to our rules. To do this, you have to take the money out of the picture. Financial risk can't be a factor in making decisions. It might be hard to incorporate this ideology while trading but you can remove the emotions from trading only if you are able to get this right. Here are some ways to trade without letting your emotions get in the way: 1. Don't put yourself in more risk than you can handle. Most traders keep their losers too long and sell their winners too soon because they take on too much risk. Taking on too much risk ties down your risk management, making it harder for you to make trades with a positive expected value. This is something you can change by taking less risk. Then, many traders find that the upside isn't enough to make them want to trade at all. If a trader doesn't have a way to make good profits with the money they have, they may start to take on more risk to try to get better results. But you can make your trades more likely to go up without taking on more risk if you scale into your positions. As the trade goes in your favour, add to your winners. You don't need to put yourself in danger by doing this. You can lower the risk of your other positions by using the money you made from your first positions. Add to the list of winners. Don't throw money at your losers. 2. Change how you think about money We often tell people that it's best not to look at the summary of their trades' profits and losses. When you do this, you get too caught up in the current gain or loss on your positions, which makes your fear or greed about the trade worse. Instead of making decisions based on the chart, think about the money. People can't be expected to trade without checking to see if they are making or losing money. So, if you have to look at your trades, instead of focusing on how much money you are making or losing right now, think about how much money you will make or lose if your trade hits the stop loss levels. If you buy 1,000 shares of a stock for Rs 100 and the stop is at Rs 90, you could lose Rs 10,000. That's how much you could lose when you leave. Let's say that this stock goes up to Rs 120 and you move your stop to Rs 110. Even though your position is up Rs 20,000 right now, if you get out on the stop, you will only make Rs 10,000. You need to pay attention to the number that matches your exit point. Don't think too much about where you are now. If you congratulate yourself on making Rs 20,000 on a trade, you start to feel something about that number. If so, you are less likely to sell the stock if it goes back down to Rs 110, where you would only make Rs 10,000. You thought you would make Rs 20,000 and hoped it would be more. It hurts to leave at a lower price, so many people stay and wait for things to turn around. Count on what you already have, not what you want. 3. Make a plan on paper and trade it Some people can lose their minds because of how they feel about a trade. When you make a trade, your feelings can make you break your trading rules. Having a plan written down will help you stay on track when you get lost. The plan doesn't need to be long or hard to understand. A trading plan shouldn't be longer than one page, in our opinion. It should include your rules for entry, risk management, scaling, and leaving the business. There should also be a review process so that you can work to make your rules and how they are carried out better. When you write down an idea, it gives it more value. Before you make another trade, take the time to write out a plan.