Lefty Gomez, baseball legend, said it best: “I’d rather be lucky than good.”
Often, the trader is driven by the need to be right, by the need to successfully pick the market’s direction. When being correct is the motivation, successful trading becomes a difficult task.
Success comes in when the trader decides to be profitable rather than being right. When he takes this step, plans are put in place to identify setups, manage risk, accept drawdowns, avoid the ‘this way or that way’ trade.
We are in the market to make profits, not for being the most intelligent.
Avoiding the need to be right, will help us to accept our failure and cut our losses quickly, so indirectly saving our capital and getting ready for the next opportunity.
What Winners Do
A lot of traders who entered in stock market, trades randomly, without having a proper method or a strategy and end up losing their capital. Those who started to do analysis and made proper strategies, get into the category of successful traders.
This is the reason the no. of successful traders are very few in this market. But there is still one question, those who are highly successful in analysis, are also successful in trading throughout their life?
I have seen many traders, who were excellent in analysis and making strategy, but still failed in trading. The reason behind their failure was lack of proper risk management, emotions and lack of discipline. They were good in their work but failed due to these reasons.
My motive is, doing analysis is very important but it is not all for being successful in trading. It is just half of work, the other half is prepare yourself for drawdowns, which are part of trading and cannot be removed. Control your emotions and always trade with a discipline. Otherwise you could be a good analyst, but it will be difficult to be a good trader.