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Recent Experiences That Nearly Made Me Quit Trading

October 19, 2011 by tradingsimply2 Leave a Comment

Well what can I say?

The last four weeks have been mental for me and has forced me to stop trading. This post is a follow-up post to this one. The reasons why I stopped trading are:

  1. Work pressures – I had a full time job and a part-time job effectively working seven days a week (half day Saturday). The pressure to perform from both roles increased significantly.
  2. Family pressures increasing – these are likely to increase in the future adding more pressure to my ability to commit to trading

The result of the above two pressures had turned my positive psychology into negative psychology; I was left with no time or energy to commit to stock market analysis and trading. This helped to reinforce my negative psychology.

Once I realised this – which took me two weeks – I exited all of my open positions (closed all spread bets). I took this course of action because my experience has shown that negative psychology ultimately leads to losses.

In my case, negative psychology will lead to losses because I will take my frustrations out on the stock market by trading irrationally; my mind will usually focus on the things that are affecting my psychology at the very instant that I am analysing charts or even placing live trades. Negative psychology can affect different traders in different ways.

It can be easy for people unfamiliar with trading stock markets to say ‘oh, why don’t you just not think or worry about those things and get on with trading the markets’. These are people who have usually never traded shares or who have an incomplete understanding of what it takes to operate successfully as a stock market trader.

One other thing that seriously annoyed me though was the fact that I could not update the blog. It was the most frustrating period and the brutal icing on the cake was that it was not the stock market itself that affected my psychology, it was external pressures seemingly beyond my control from work and family life. Even though stock markets have been a tough environment to work in, it was still the external pressures that forced me out. For completeness, I have reproduced a problem solving exercise I did on my lunch break on my part-time job.

[table “8” not found /]

Of course, taking action with these solutions does not guarantee that external pressures will be eliminated. Life is just like that and pressures will always exist.

Well, I’ve already given up working weekends so action has already been taken. In terms of the remaining solutions the only sensible action to take next would be to develop a paid-for product for The Trading Simply Blog. I have resisted doing this because I wanted the blog to have more room to grow with good stock market, spread betting and trading content. The blog itself has only been regularly updated since the beginning of August this year. So with this in mind I will be creating a high value product that differentiates itself from all the usual stock market ‘guides’ and ebooks. I have not even decided on what type of product I will be producing which is where I need your help: is there anything that I could produce that would be useful to people and that stands out from the crowd? Let me know by email or by leaving a comment in the comments box below.

As mentioned in the previous post, I intend to resume trading the week beginning 23rd October and will be starting my usual stock markets scans and analysis this weekend.
Newsletter subscribers get additional commentary about my closed trades – its free.

Any trades listed above are closed trades as I do not make public open positions.

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