TAKING RESPONSIBILITY
Although the words “taking responsibility” sound simple, the concept is neither easy to grasp nor easy to put into practice in your trading. We have all heard the words and been confronted with the need to take responsibility so many times in our lives that it is easy to take for granted that we know exactly what the phrase means.
Taking responsibility in your trading and learning the appropriate principles of success are inextricably connected. You have to understand, with every fiber of your being, the ways in which you are and are not responsible for your success as a trader. Only then can you take on the characteristics that will allow you to join the select group of traders who are consistently successful in the markets.
At the end of Chapter 1, I introduced the idea of stepping into a future projection of yourself. In other words, the consistently successful trader that you want to become doesn’t exist yet. You must create a new version of yourself, just as a sculptor creates a likeness of a model.
SHAPING YOUR MENTAL ENVIRONMENT
The tools you will use to create this new version of yourself are your willingness and desire to learn, fueled by your passion to be successful. If the willingness and desire to learn are your primary tools, then what is your medium? An artist creating a sculpture can choose to work in a number of mediums—clay marble, or metal, for example—but if you want to create a new version of your personality that expresses itself as a consistently successful trader, you have only your beliefs and attitudes. The medium for your artistic endeavor will be your mental environment, where with your desire to learn, you can restructure and install the beliefs and attitudes that are necessary to achieve your ultimate goal.
I am assuming your ultimate goal is consistency. If you’re like most traders, you don’t realize the fullest potential of the opportunities available
to you. To realize more and more of that potential, to make it more and more of a reality in your life, your primary goal has to be to learn how to think like a consistently successful trader.
Remember, the best traders think in a number of unique ways. They have acquired a mental structure that allows them to trade without fear and, at the same time, keeps them from becoming reckless and committing fear- based errors. This mind-set has a number of components, but the bottom line is that successful traders have virtually eliminated the effects of fear and recklessness from their trading. These two fundamental characteristics allow them to achieve consistent results.
When you acquire this mind-set, you, too, will be able to trade without fear. You will no longer be susceptible to the multitude of fear-based errors that come from rationalizing, subconsciously distorting information, hesitating, jumping the gun, or hoping. Once the fear is gone, there just won’t be a reason to make these errors and, as a result, they will virtually disappear from your trading.
However, eliminating fear is only half the equation. The other half is the need to develop restraint. Excellent traders have learned that it is essential to have internal discipline or a mental mechanism to counteract the negative effects of euphoria or the overconfidence that comes from a string of winning trades. For a trader, winning is extremely dangerous if you haven’t learned how to monitor and control yourself.
If we start from the premise that to create consistency traders must focus their efforts on developing a trader’s mind-set, then it is easy to see why so many traders don’t succeed. Instead of learning to think like traders, they think about how they can make more money by learning about the markets. It’s almost impossible not to fall into this trap. There are a number of psychological factors that make it very easy to assume that it’s what you don’t know about the markets that causes your losses and lack of consistent results.
However, that’s just not the case. The consistency you seek is in your mind, not in the markets. It’s attitudes and beliefs about being wrong, losing money, and the tendency to become reckless, when you’re feeling good, that cause most losses—not technique or market knowledge.
For example, if you could choose one of the following two traders to manage your money, which one would you pick? The first trader uses a
simple, possibly even mediocre trading technique, but possesses a mind-set that is not susceptible to subconsciously distorting market information, hesitating, rationalizing, hoping, or jumping the gun. The second trader is a phenomenal analyst, but is still operating out of the typical fears that make him susceptible to all of the psychological maladies that the other trader is free of. The right choice should be obvious. The first trader is going to achieve far better results with your money.
Attitude produces better overall results than analysis or technique. Of course, the ideal situation is to have both, but you really don’t need both, because if you have the right attitude—the right mind-set—then everything else about trading will be relatively easy, even simple, and certainly a lot more fun. I know for some of you this may be difficult to believe, or even distressing especially if you’ve been struggling for years to learn everything you can about the market.
Interestingly, most traders are closer to the way they need to think when they first begin trading than at any other time in their careers. Many people begin trading with a very unrealistic concept of the inherent dangers involved. This is particularly true if their first trade is a winner. Then they go into the second trade with little or no fear. If that trade is a winner, they go into the next trade with even less concern for what would otherwise be the unacceptable possibility of a loss. Each subsequent win convinces them that there is nothing to fear and that trading is the easiest possible way to make money.
This lack of fear translates into a carefree state of mind, similar to the state of mind many great athletes describe as a “zone.” If you’ve ever had the occasion to experience the zone in some sport, then you know it is a state of mind in which there is absolutely no fear and you act and react instinctively. You don’t weigh alternatives or consider consequences or second-guess yourself. You are in the moment and “just doing it.” Whatever you do turns out to be exactly what needed to be done.
Most athletes never reach this level of play, because they never get past the fear of making a mistake. Athletes who reach the point where there is absolutely no fear of the consequences of screwing up will usually, and quite spontaneously, enter into “the zone.” By the way, a psychological zone is not a condition you can will yourself into, the way you can will yourself into a feat of endurance. It is a state of mind you find yourself in
that is inherently creative, and usually if you start thinking about your actions at a rational or conscious level, you pop right out of it.
Even though you cannot force or will yourself into a zone, you can set up the kind of mental conditions that are most conducive to experiencing “the zone,” by developing a positive winning attitude. I define a positive winning attitude as expecting a positive result from your efforts, with an acceptance that whatever results you get are a perfect reflection of your level of development and what you need to learn to do better.
That’s what the great athletes have: a winning attitude that allows them to easily move beyond their mistakes and keep going. Others get bogged down in negative self-criticism, regret, and self-pity. Not many people ever develop a positive winning attitude. The curious anomaly of trading is that, if you start with a winning trade, you will automatically experience the kind of carefree mind-set that is a by-product of a winning attitude, without having developed the attitude itself. I know this may sound a bit confusing, but it has some profound implications.
If a few winning trades can cause you to enter into the kind of carefree state of mind that is an essential component to your success, but is not founded on the appropriate attitudes, then what you have is a prescription for extreme misunderstanding about the nature of trading that inevitably results in both emotional and financial disaster.
Putting on a few (or more) winning trades does not mean you have become a trader, but that’s the way it feels, because it taps us into a state of mind that only the most accomplished people experience on a consistent basis. The fact is, you don’t need the slightest bit of skill to put on a winning trade, and if it’s possible to put on one winning trade without the slightest bit of skill, it is certainly possible to put on another and another. I know of several people who started their trading careers with fairly substantial strings of winning trades.
When you’re feeling confident and unencumbered by fears and worries, it isn’t difficult to put on a string of winning trades because it’s easy to get into a flow, a kind of natural rhythm, where what you need to do seems obvious or self-evident. It’s almost as if the market screams at you when to buy and when to sell, and you need very little in the way of analytical sophistication. And, of course, because you have no fear, you can execute your trades with no internal argument or conflict.
The point I am making is that winning in any endeavor is mostly a function of attitude. Many people are certainly aware of this, but at the same time, most people don’t understand the significant part attitude plays in their results. In most sports or other competitive activities, participants must develop physical skills as well as mental skills in the form of strategies. If opponents are not evenly matched in the skills department, the one with superior skills usually (but not always) wins. When an underdog beats a superior opponent, what’s the determining factor? When two opponents are evenly matched, what’s the factor that tips the balance one way or the other? In both cases, the answer is attitude.
What makes trading so fascinating and, at the same time, difficult to learn is that you really don’t need lots of skills; you just need a genuine winning attitude. Experiencing a few or more winning trades can make you feel like a winner, and that feeling is what sustains the winning streak. This is why it is possible for a novice trader to put on a string of winning trades, when many of the industry’s best market analysts would give their right arms for a string of winning trades. The analysts have the skills, but they don’t have the winning attitude. They’re operating out of fear. The novice trader experiences the feeling of a winning attitude because he’s not afraid. But that doesn’t mean he has a winning attitude; it only means he hasn’t experienced any pain from his trading activities to make him afraid.
REACTING TO LOSS
Eventually, our novice trader will experience a loss and being wrong, regardless of how positive he’s feeling. Losing and being wrong are inevitable realities of trading. The most positive attitude imaginable coupled with the best analytical skills can’t prevent a trader from eventually experiencing a losing trade. The markets are just too erratic and there are too many variables to consider for any trader to be right every time.
What happens when the novice trader finally does lose? What effect will it have on his carefree state of mind? The answers will depend on his expectations going into the trade and how he interprets the experience. And how he interprets the experience is a function of his beliefs and attitudes.
What if he is operating out of a belief that there’s no possible way to avoid a loss, because losing is a natural consequence of trading—no different from, let’s say, a restaurant owner incurring the expense of having to buy food? Furthermore, suppose that he has completely accepted the risk, meaning that he has considered and accounted for all of what would otherwise be the unacceptable possibilities in the market’s behavior, both financially and emotionally. With these beliefs and expectations, it is unlikely that he would experience a deterioration of his attitude, and would simply go on to the next trade. By the way, this is an example of an ideal set of trading beliefs and attitudes.
Now suppose that he hasn’t completely accepted the risk. What if his expectations didn’t take into account any market behavior other than what he wanted? From this mental perspective, if the market doesn’t do what he wants, he is going to feel pain—emotional pain. Expectations are our mental representations of how some future moment in the environment is going to look, sound, feel, smell, or taste. Depending upon how much energy is behind the expectation, it can hurt a lot when it isn’t fulfilled.
Of the two different perspectives I just described, which one is likely to be held by our novice trader? The latter, of course. Only the very best traders have acquired the perspective described in the first scenario. And, as I indicated in Chapter 1, unless these very best traders grew up in successful trading families or had super traders for mentors (where appropriate attitudes about risk and loss were instilled in them from the very beginning of their careers), virtually every one of them had the common experience of losing one or more fortunes before they realized how they needed to think in order to be consistently successful.
It’s a fundamental shift in attitude that accounts for their success, not some brilliant realization about the market, as most people erroneously assume. This erroneous assumption is prevalent among traders simply because very few of them really understand, at the deepest levels, just how critical a component attitude is in determining one’s success.
We can safely assume that after a loss, our novice trader will be in a state of emotional pain. As a result, his trading will take on a whole new quality. He’ll definitely lose that carefree state of mind, but more important, he will feel that the market did this to him: The market caused him to feel
the pain he is experiencing; the market took away his winning feeling by subjecting him to a loss.
Notice how our trader is blaming the markets for losing or what he didn’t get. Notice, too, how natural it is to feel the way he does. Think about how many times in our lives, especially as children, we were doing something we really enjoyed, like playing with a toy or with our friends, and someone with more power and authority forced us to stop what we were doing and do something we didn’t want to do. All of us have lost things, had things taken away from us, been denied things we wanted or believed we deserved, been prevented from continuing an activity we were in the middle of, or been blocked from pursuing an idea we were passionate about.
The point is that in many of these situations, we did not need to take personal responsibility for what happened to us or for the pain we experienced, because we were powerless to do anything about it. We didn’t choose to be forced out of a state of joy and happiness, into a state of emotional pain. The decision was out of our hands, against our will, and usually quite abrupt. Even though we may have been told we were responsible for what was happening to us, we may not have believed it or understood what it meant.
What’s tangible, and what we can most easily relate to, is that we were having fun, and someone or something took us out of that fun and into pain. It wasn’t our choice. The cause of our pain came to us from the outside; therefore, whatever force acted upon us in that moment was to blame. We learned not only that feeling good can instantly be replaced with feeling bad through no fault of our own; we also learned about betrayal. We felt betrayed because many of these situations were completely unexpected or unanticipated, meaning, we were unprepared for how some people in our lives had the potential to behave. If their behavior caused us to flip into a state of emotional pain, then we quite naturally would have felt betrayed.
As a side note, I feel it is important to say that many of our past, emotionally painful experiences were the result of well-meaning parents, teachers and friends, many of whom were only doing what they believed, at the time, was best for us. The best example is a child playing with a toy that is inherently dangerous. Take the toy away, and the child will cry to express the emotional pain he is experiencing, and, if we are dealing with a very
young or immature child, in all likelihood he will not listen to anything reasonable that we say about why he cannot play with that toy.
But, at the same time, many people are born to immature and unreasonable parents, or encounter emotionally disturbed teachers, coaches, and employees who subconsciously or intentionally inflict their personal problems on anyone they perceive as having less power. What’s even worse is many of the people who have a tendency toward victimizing others are also clever enough to do it in a way that makes their victims believe they caused their own pain. In any case, whether our painful experiences are the result of an act of love or intentionally inflicted is something each of us will have to determine for ourselves.
The bottom line is that, as adults when we get into a trading mode, we don’t realize how natural it is to associate the instantaneous shift from joy to pain that we experienced so often as children with the same instantaneous shift from joy to pain that occurs when we trade. The implications are that if we haven’t learned to accept the inherent risks of trading and don’t know how to guard against making these natural connections between our past and the present, we will end up blaming the market for our results instead of taking responsibility for them.
Even though most people who trade consider themselves responsible adults, only the very best traders have reached a point where they can and do accept complete responsibility for the outcome of any particular trade. Everyone else to one degree or another assumes they are taking responsibility; but the reality is that they want the market to do it for them. The typical trader wants the market to fulfill his expectations, his hopes, and dreams.
Society may work this way but the markets certainly don’t. In society, we can expect other people to behave in reasonable and responsible ways. When they don’t, and if we suffer as a result, society makes remedies available to rectify the imbalance and make us whole again. The market, on the other hand, has no responsibility to give us anything or do anything that would benefit us. This may not be the way markets are advertised and certainly not the impression they want to project, but the reality is, every trader who participates in the markets does so for his own benefit. The only way one trader can benefit is if some other trader loses, whether the loss is in actual dollars as in a futures trade, or lost opportunity as in a stock trade.
When you put on a trade, it is in anticipation of making money. Every other trader in the world who puts on a trade does so for the same reason. When you look at your relationship with the market from this perspective, you could say that your purpose is to extract money from the markets, but, by the same token, the market’s sole purpose is to extract money or opportunity from you.
If the market is a group of people interacting to extract money from one another, then what is the market’s responsibility to the individual trader? It has no responsibility other than to follow the rules it has established to facilitate this activity. The point is, if you have ever found yourself blaming the market or feeling betrayed, then you have not given enough consideration to the implications of what it means to play a zero- sum game. Any degree of blaming means you have not accepted the reality that the market owes you nothing, regardless of what you want or think or how much effort you put into your trading.
In the market, typical social values of exchange do not come into play. If you don’t understand this and find a way to reconcile the differences between the social norms you grew up with and the way the market works, you will continue to project your hopes, dreams, and desires onto the market believing it’s going to do something for you. When it doesn’t, you’ll feel angry, frustrated, emotionally distraught, and betrayed.
Taking responsibility means acknowledging and accepting, at the deepest part of your identity, that you—not the market—are completely responsible for your success or failure as a trader. Granted, the market’s purpose is to separate you from your money; but in the process of doing so, it also provides you with an endless stream of opportunities for you to take money from it. When prices move, that movement represents the collective actions of everyone participating at that moment. The market also generates information about itself, and makes it extremely easy to enter and exit trades (depending, of course, on the number of people participating).
From the individual’s perspective, price movement, information, and the ability to enter and exit trades represent opportunities to see something and to act on what you perceive. During each moment the markets are open, you have an opportunity to enter a position, lighten up a position, add to a position, or exit a position. These are all opportunities to enrich yourself by taking profits or, at least, cutting your losses.
Let me pose a question. Do you feel responsible for fulfilling some other trader’s expectations, hopes, dreams, and desires? Of course you don’t. It sounds absurd to even ask. However, if you ever find yourself blaming the market and feeling betrayed, that is essentially what you are doing. You are expecting the collective actions of everyone participating in the market to make the market act in a way that gives you what you want. You have to learn for yourself how to get what you want out of the markets. The first major step in this learning process is taking complete and absolute responsibility.
Taking responsibility means believing that all of your outcomes are self-generated; that your results are based on your interpretations of market information, the decisions you make and the actions you take as a result. Taking anything less than complete responsibility sets up two major psychological obstacles that will block your success. First, you will establish an adversarial relationship with the market that takes you out of the constant flow of opportunities. Second, you will mislead yourself into believing that your trading problems and lack of success can be rectified through market analysis.
Let’s consider the first obstacle. When you project any degree of responsibility onto the market for giving you money or cutting your losses, the market can all too easily take on the quality of an adversary or enemy. Losing (when you expected the market to do something different from what it did) will tap you into the same childlike feelings of pain, anger, resentment, and powerlessness that all of us felt when someone took something away from us, didn’t give us what we wanted, or wouldn’t let us do what we wanted.
No one likes to feel denied, especially if we believe that getting what we want will make us happy. In each of these situations, something or someone outside of us prevented us from expressing ourselves in some particular way. In other words, some outside force was acting against the inner force of our desires and expectations.
As a result, it feels natural to assign the market the power of an outside force that either gives or takes away. But consider the fact that the market presents its information from a neutral perspective. That means the market doesn’t know what you want or expect, nor does it care, unless, of course, you trade the kind of position that can have a major impact on prices.
Otherwise, each moment, each bid, and each offer gives you the opportunity to do something. You can put on a trade, take profits, or take off a loser. This is also true for those of you who are floor traders and are personally known to other floor traders, who may also know your position and, to your detriment, purposely take advantage of that knowledge. It just means that you have to be faster and more focused, or take whatever limitations you have in these areas into consideration and trade accordingly.
From the market’s perspective, each moment is neutral; to you, the observer, every moment and price change can have meaning. But where do these meaning exist? The meanings are based on what you’ve learned, and exist inside your mind, not in the market. The market doesn’t attach meanings or interpret the information it generates about itself (although there are always individuals who will offer an interpretation if you’re willing to listen). Furthermore, the market doesn’t know how you define an opportunity or a loss. The market doesn’t know whether you perceive it as an endless stream of opportunities to enter and exit trades for both profits and losses at each and every moment, or whether you perceive it as a greedy monster ready and willing in any given moment to devour your money.
If you perceive the endless stream of opportunities to enter and exit trades without self-criticism and regret, then you will be in the best frame of mind to act in your own best interest and learn from your experiences. On the other hand, if what you perceive in market information is painful in some way, then you will naturally try to avoid that pain by either consciously or subconsciously blocking that information from your awareness. In the process of blocking that information, you’ll systematically cut yourself off from any number of opportunities to enrich yourself. In other words, you cut yourself off from the opportunity flow
Furthermore, it will feel like the market is against you but only if you expect it to do something for you, or if you believe that it owes you something. If someone or something is against you and causes you pain, how are you likely to respond? You’ll feel compelled to fight, but what exactly are you fighting? The market is certainly not fighting you. Yes, the market wants your money, but it also provides you with the opportunity to take as much as you can. Although it may feel as if you are fighting the market, or it is fighting you, the reality is you are simply fighting the
negative consequences of not fully accepting that the market owes you nothing; and that you need to take advantage of the opportunities it presents by yourself, 100 percent and not one degree less.
The way to take maximum advantage of a situation where you are being offered unlimited opportunities to do something for yourself is to get into the flow. The market does have a flow. It is often erratic, especially in the shorter time frames, but it does display symmetrical patterns that repeat themselves over and over again. Obviously, it’s a contradiction to flow with something you are against. If you want to start sensing the flow of the market, your mind has to be relatively free of fear, anger, regret, betrayal, despair, and disappointment. You won’t have a reason to experience these negative emotions when you assume absolute responsibility.
Earlier, I said that when you don’t take responsibility, one of the major psychological obstacles that can block your success is that you will mislead yourself into believing that your trading problems and lack of consistency can be rectified through market analysis. To illustrate this point, let’s go back to our novice trader who started out with a carefree state of mind until he experienced his first loss.
After winning with such ease and effortlessness, the abrupt shift to emotional pain can be quite shocking—not shocking enough, however, to quit trading. Besides, in his mind the situation wasn’t his fault anyway; the market did it to him. Instead of quitting, the great feeling that he experienced when he was winning will be fresh in his mind, and will inspire him with a sense of determination to continue trading.
Only now he’s going to be smarter about it. He’s going to put some effort into it and learn everything he can about the markets. It’s perfectly logical to think that if he can win not knowing anything, he’ll be able to clean up when he does know something. But there’s a big problem here that very few, if any, traders will have any awareness of until long after the damage is done. Learning about the markets is fine and doesn’t cause a problem in itself. It’s the underlying reason for learning about the market that will ultimately prove to be his undoing.
As I said a moment ago, the sudden shift from joy to pain usually creates quite a psychological shock. Very few people ever learn how to reconcile these kinds of experiences in a healthy way. Techniques are available, but they aren’t widely known. The typical response in most
people, especially in the type of person attracted to trading, is revenge. For traders, the only way to extract that revenge is to conquer the market, and the only way to conquer the market is through market knowledge, or so they think. In other words, the underlying reason for why the novice trader is learning about the market is to overcome the market, to prove something to it and himself, and most important, to prevent the market from hurting him again. He is not learning the market simply as a means to give himself a systematic way of winning, but rather as a way to either avoid pain or prove something that has absolutely nothing to do with looking at the market from an objective perspective. He doesn’t realize it, but as soon as he made the assumption that knowing something about the market can prevent him from experiencing pain or can help satisfy his desire for revenge or to prove something, he sealed his fate to become a loser.
In effect what he has done is set up an irreconcilable dilemma. He is learning how to recognize and understand the market’s collective behavior patterns, and that’s good. It even feels good. He’s inspired because he assumes he’s learning about the market in order to become a winner. As a result, he will typically go on a knowledge quest, learning about trend lines, chart patterns, support and resistance, candlesticks, market profiles, point and line charts, Elliott waves, Fibonacci retracements, oscillators, relative strength, stochastics, and many more technical tools too numerous to mention. Curiously, even though his knowledge has increased, he now finds that he’s developed problems executing his trades. He hesitates, second- guesses himself, or doesn’t put on a trade at all, in spite of any number of clear signals to do so. It’s all frustrating, even maddening, because what’s happened doesn’t make sense. He did what he was supposed to do—he learned—only to find that the more he learned, the less he took advantage of. He would never believe that he did anything wrong by devoting himself to learning; he simply did it for the wrong reasons.
He won’t be able to trade effectively if he is trying to prove something or anything for that matter. If you have to win, if you have to be right, if you can’t lose or can’t be wrong, you will cause yourself to define and perceive categories of market information as painful. In other words, you will view as painful any information the market generates that is in opposition to what will make you happy.
The dilemma is that our minds are wired to avoid both physical and emotional pain, and learning about the markets will not compensate for the negative effects our pain-avoidance mechanisms have on our trading. Everybody understands the nature of avoiding physical pain. Accidentally set your hand on a hot burner, and your hand moves away from the heat automatically; it’s an instinctive reaction. However, when it comes to avoiding emotional pain and the negative consequences it creates, especially for traders, very few people understand the dynamics. It’s absolutely essential to your development that you understand these negative effects and learn how to take conscious control in a way that helps you fulfill your goals.
Our minds have a number of ways to shield us from information that we have learned to perceive as painful. For example, at a conscious level, we can rationalize, justify, or make a case for staying in a losing trade. Some of the more typical ways we do this are to call our trading buddies, talk to our broker, or look at indicators we never use, all for the express purpose of gathering nonpainful information in order to deny the validity of the painful information. At a subconscious level, our minds will automatically alter, distort, or specifically exclude information from our conscious awareness. In other words, we don’t know at a conscious level that our pain-avoidance mechanisms are either excluding or altering the information being offered by the market.
Consider the experience of being in a losing trade when the market is making consistently higher highs and higher lows or lower highs and lower lows against your position, while you refuse to acknowledge you are in a losing trade because you have focused all your attention on the tics that go in your favor. On the average, you are only getting one out of four or five tics in your direction; but it doesn’t matter because every time you get one, you are convinced the market has reversed and is coming back. Instead the market keeps going against you. At some point, the dollar value of the loss becomes so great that it cannot be denied and you finally exit the trade.
The first reaction that traders universally have when looking back at such a trade is, “Why didn’t I just take my loss and reverse?” The opportunity to put on a trade in the opposite direction was easily recognized once there was nothing at stake. But we were blinded to this opportunity while we were in the trade, because at that time the information indicating it
was an opportunity was defined as painful, so we blocked it from our awareness.
When our hypothetical trader first started trading, he was having fun; he was in a carefree state of mind; he had no personal agendas and nothing to prove. As long as he was winning, he put his trades on from a “let’s see what will happen” perspective. The more he won, the less he considered the possibility of ever losing. When he finally did lose, he was probably in a state of mind where he least expected it. Instead of assuming that the cause of his pain was his erroneous expectation about what the market was supposed to do or not do, he blamed the market, and resolved that by gaining market knowledge, he could prevent such experiences from recurring. In other words, he made a dramatic shift in his perspective from carefree to preventing pain by avoiding losses.
The problem is that preventing pain by avoiding losses can’t be done. The market generates behavior patterns and the patterns repeat themselves, but not every time. So again, there is no possible way to avoid losing or being wrong. Our trader won’t sense these trading realities, because he is being driven forward by two compelling forces: (1) he desperately wants that winning feeling back, and (2) he is extremely enthusiastic about all of the market knowledge he is acquiring. What he doesn’t realize is that, in spite of his enthusiasm, when he went from a carefree state of mind to a prevent-and-avoid mode of thinking, he shifted from a positive to a negative attitude.
He’s no longer focused on just winning, but rather on how he can avoid pain by preventing the market from hurting him again. This kind of negative perspective isn’t any different from the tennis player or golfer who is focused on trying not to make a mistake, the more he tries not to make a mistake, the more mistakes he makes. However, this mode of thinking is much easier to recognize in sports because there’s a more discernable connection between one’s focus and one’s results. With trading, the connection can be obscured and more difficult to recognize as a result of the positive feelings being generated from discovering new relationships in market data and behavior.
Since he is feeling good, there’s no reason to suspect that anything is wrong, except that the degree to which his focus is weighted toward pain- avoidance is the same degree by which he will create the very experiences
he is trying to avoid. In other words, the more he has to win and not lose, the less tolerance he will have for any information that might indicate he is not getting what he wants. The more information that he has the potential to block, the less he will be able to perceive an opportunity to act in his own best interests.
Learning more and more about the markets only to avoid pain will compound his problems because the more he learns, the more he will naturally expect from the markets, making it all the more painful when the markets don’t do their part. He has unwittingly created a vicious cycle where the more he learns, the more debilitated he becomes; the more debilitated he becomes, the more he feel compelled to learn. The cycle will continue until he either quits trading in disgust or recognizes that the root cause of his trading problems is his perspective, not his lack of market knowledge.
WINNERS, LOSERS, BOOMERS, AND BUSTERS
It takes some time before most traders either throw in the towel or find out the true source of their success. In the meantime, some traders manage to get enough right about trading to enter into what is commonly referred to as the “boom and bust cycle.”
Contrary to what some of you may have inferred from the example of the novice trader, not everyone has an inherently negative attitude and is therefore doomed to lose consistently. Yes, it is true that some traders do consistently lose, often until they lose everything or quit trading because they can’t tolerate any more emotional pain. However, there are also many traders who are tenacious students of the market and have a sufficiently winning attitude going into trading so that, in spite of the many difficulties, they eventually learn how to make money. But, and I want to emphasize this, they learn how to make money only on a limited basis; they haven’t yet learned how to counteract the negative effects of euphoria or how to compensate for the potential for self-sabotage.
Euphoria and self-sabotage are two powerful psychological forces that will have an extremely negative effect on your bottom line. But, they are not forces you have to concern yourself with until you start winning, or start
winning on a consistent basis, and that’s a big problem. When you’re winning, you are least likely to concern yourself with anything that might be a potential problem, especially something that feels as good as euphoria. One of the primary characteristics of euphoria is that it creates a sense of supreme confidence where the possibility of anything going wrong is virtually inconceivable. Conversely, errors that result from self-sabotage have their root in any number of conflicts that traders have about deserving the money or deserving to win.
It’s when you’re winning that you are most susceptible to making a mistake, overtrading, putting on too large a position, violating your rules, or generally operating as if no prudent boundaries on your behavior are necessary. You may even go to the extreme of thinking you are the market. However, the market rarely agrees, and when it disagrees, you’ll get hurt. The loss and the emotional pain are usually significant. You will experience a boom, followed by the inevitable bust.
If I were to classify traders based on the kind of results they achieve, I would put them into three broad categories. The smallest group, probably fewer than 10 percent of the active traders, are the consistent winners. They have a steadily rising equity curve with relatively minor drawdowns. The drawdowns they do experience are the type of normal losses that any trading methodology or system incurs. Not only have they learned how to make money, but they are no longer susceptible to the psychological forces that cause the boom-and-bust cycle.
The next group, which consists of between 30 and 40 percent of the active traders, are consistent losers. Their equity curves are mirror images of the consistent winners’ curves, but in the opposite direction—many losing trades with an occasional winner. Regardless of how long they have been trading, there’s much about it that they haven’t learned. They either have illusions about the nature of trading or are addicted to it in ways that make it virtually impossible for them to be winners.
The largest group, the remaining 40 to 50 percent of the active traders, are the “boom and busters.” They have learned how to make money, but they haven’t learned there’s a whole body of trading skills that have to be mastered in order to keep the money they make. As a result, their equity curves typically look like roller-coaster rides, with a nice, steady assent into
a steep dropoff, then another nice, steady assent into another steep dropoff. The roller-coaster cycle continues on and on.
I have worked with many experienced traders who have put together incredible winning streaks, sometimes going months without a losing day; having fifteen or twenty winning trades in a row is not unusual for them. But for the boom and busters, these streaks always end the same way—in huge losses that are the result of either euphoria or self-sabotage.
If the losses are the result of euphoria, it really doesn’t matter what form the streak takes—a number of wins in a row, a steadily rising equity curve, or even one winning trade. Everyone seems to have a different threshold for when overconfidence or euphoria starts to take hold of the thinking process. However, the moment euphoria takes hold, the trader is in deep trouble.
In a state of overconfidence or euphoria, you can’t perceive any risk because euphoria makes you believe that absolutely nothing can go wrong. If nothing can go wrong, there’s no need for rules or boundaries to govern your behavior. So putting on a larger than usual position is not only appealing, it’s compelling.
However, as soon as you put on the larger-than-usual position, you’re in danger. The larger the position, the greater the financial impact small fluctuations in price will have on your equity. Combine the larger-than- normal impact of a move against your position with a resolute belief that the market will do exactly as you expect, and you have a situation in which one tic in the opposition direction of your trade can cause you to go into a state of “mind-freeze” and become immobilized.
When you finally do pull yourself out of it, you’ll be dazed, disillusioned, and betrayed, and you’ll wonder how something like that could have happened. In fact, you were betrayed by your own emotions. However, if you’re not aware of or don’t understand the underlying dynamics I just described, you’ll have no other choice but to blame the market. If you believe the market did this to you, then you’ll feel compelled to learn more about the market in order to protect yourself. The more you learn, the more confident you will naturally become in your ability to win. As your confidence grows, the more likely that at some point you will cross the threshold into euphoria and start the cycle all over again.
Losses that result from self-sabotage can be just as damaging, but they’re usually more subtle in nature. Making errors like putting in a sell for a buy or vice versa, or indulging yourself in some distracting activity at the most inopportune time are typical examples of how traders make sure they don’t win.
Why wouldn’t someone want to win? It’s really not a question of what someone wants, because I believe that all traders want to win. Yet, there are often conflicts about winning. Sometimes these conflicts are so powerful that we find our behavior is in direct conflict with what we want. These conflicts could stem from religious upbringing, work ethic or certain types of childhood trauma.
If these conflicts exist, it means that your mental environment is not completely aligned with your goals. In other words, not all parts of you would argue for the same outcome. Therefore, you can’t assume that you have the capacity to give yourself an unlimited amount of money just because you have learned how to trade and the money is there for the taking.
A futures broker at one of the major brokerage firms once commented that when it comes to his customers, he lives by the motto that all commodity traders are terminal, and it is his job to keep them happy until they’re gone. He said this facetiously, but there is a lot of truth to his statement. Obviously, if you lose more money than you make, you can’t survive. What’s less obvious, and one of the mysteries of being successful, is that if you win, you may still be terminal; that is, if you win and you haven’t learned how to create a healthy balance between confidence and restraint, or you haven’t learned how to recognize and compensate for any potential you have to self-destruct, you will sooner or later lose.
If you are among those in the boom-and-bust cycle, consider this: If you could redo every losing trade that was the result of an error or recklessness, how much money would you have now? Based on these recalculated results, what would your equity curve look like? I’m sure many of you would fall into the category of consistent winners. Now think about how you responded to your losses when they occurred. Did you assume complete responsibility for them? Did you try to identify how you might change your perspective, attitude, or behavior? Or did you look to the market and wonder what you might learn about it to prevent such a thing
from happening again? Obviously, the market has nothing to do with your potential for recklessness, nor does it have anything to do with the errors you make as a result of some internal conflict about deserving the money.
Probably one of the hardest concepts for traders to effectively assimilate is that the market doesn’t create your attitude or state of mind; it simply acts as a mirror reflecting what’s inside back to you. If you are confident, it’s not because the market is making you feel that way; it is because your beliefs and attitudes are aligned in a way that allows you to step forward into an experience, take responsibility for the outcome, and extract the insight that’s been made available. You maintain your confident state of mind simply because you are constantly learning. Conversely, if you’re angry and afraid, it’s because you believe to some degree that the market creates your outcomes, not the other way around.
Ultimately, the worst consequence of not taking responsibility is that it keeps you in a cycle of pain and dissatisfaction. Think about it for a moment. If you’re not responsible for your results, then you can assume there’s nothing for you to learn, and you can stay exactly as you are. You won’t grow and you won’t change. As a result, you will perceive events in exactly the same way, and therefore respond to them in the same way, and get the same dissatisfying results.
Or, you might also assume the solution to your problems is to gain more market knowledge. It is always virtuous to learn, but in this case if you don’t take responsibility for your attitudes and perspective, then you’re learning something valuable for the wrong reasons—reasons that will cause you to use what you’ve learned in inappropriate ways. Without realizing it, you’ll be using your knowledge to avoid the responsibility of taking risks. In the process, you end up creating the very things you are trying to avoid, keeping you in a cycle of pain and dissatisfaction.
However, there is one tangible benefit to be gained from blaming the market for what you wanted and didn’t get. You can temporarily shield yourself from your own harsh self-criticism. I say “temporarily” because, when you shift responsibility, you cut yourself off from whatever you needed to learn from the experience. Remember our definition of a winning attitude: a positive expectation of your efforts with an acceptance that whatever results you get are a perfect reflection of your level of development and what you need to learn to do better.
If you shift the blame in order to block the painful feelings that result from beating yourself up, all you’ve done is put an infected Band-Aid on the wound. You may think you have solved the problem, but the problem is only going to resurface later, worse than before. It has to, simply because you haven’t learned anything that would cause you to make the kind of interpretations that would result in a more satisfying experience.
Did you ever wonder why leaving money on the table is often more painful than taking a loss? When we lose, there are any number of ways in which we can shift the blame to the market and not accept responsibility. But when we leave money on the table, we can’t blame the market. The market didn’t do anything but give us exactly what we wanted, but for whatever reason, we weren’t capable of acting on the opportunity appropriately. In other words, there’s no way to rationalize the pain away.
You are not responsible for what the market does or doesn’t do, but you are responsible for everything else that results from your trading activities. You are responsible for what you have learned, as well as for everything you haven’t learned yet that’s waiting to be discovered by you. The most efficient path to discovering what you need to be successful is to develop a winning attitude, because it’s an inherently creative perspective. Not only does a winning attitude open you up to what you need to learn; it also produces the kind of mind-set that is most conducive to discovering something no one else has experienced.
Developing a winning attitude is the key to your success. The problem for many traders is that either they think they already have one, when they don’t, or they expect the market to develop the attitude for them by giving them winning trades. You are responsible for developing your own winning attitude. The market is not going to do it for you, and, I want to be as emphatic as I can, no amount of market analysis will compensate for developing a winning attitude if you lack one. Understanding the markets will give you the edge you need to create some winning trades, but your edge won’t make you a consistent winner if you don’t have a winning attitude.
Certainly one could argue that some traders lose because they don’t understand enough about the markets and therefore they usually pick the wrong trades. As reasonable as this may sound, it has been my experience that traders with losing attitudes pick the wrong trades regardless of how
much they know about the markets. In any case, the result is the same— they lose. On the other hand, traders with winning attitudes who know virtually nothing about the markets can pick winners; and if they know a lot about the markets, they can pick even more winners.
If you want to change your experience of the markets from fearful to confident, if you want to change your results from an erratic equity curve to a steadily rising one, the first step is to embrace the responsibility and stop expecting the market to give you anything or do anything for you. If you resolve from this point forward to do it all yourself, the market can no longer be your opponent. If you stop fighting the market, which in effect means you stop fighting yourself, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you will recognize exactly what you need to learn, and how quickly you will learn it. Taking responsibility is the cornerstone of a winning attitude.
