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When it comes to dealing with intense pressure, are you a warrior or a worrier?
The truth is, just about every profession has its built-in stresses. Whether you play a supporting role as an up-and-coming minion in a multi-national megacorp, or you are a sous chef for an award-winning restaurant an hour before dinner service begins, performing well under pressure is a precondition for successful employment. And the same holds true if you trade stocks online.
Active trading requires that you remain totally focused on quickly changing market data while successfully analyzing that information to arrive at the right purchasing decision. Learning to make the stock market work for you is a life-long challenge, but one that promises great benefits and rewards if you can master the art of performing well under pressure. Often times having talent or skill is not enough. In trading its about whether you can summon it at will when the lights are on. There is an infinite amount of variables in trading stocks and very rarely is a trade “textbook” You have to be able to call an audible at a split second and those adjustments often can be the difference between a great day or bad day.
Fight or Flight: How will you respond?
The fight or flight impulse is a biological imperative that kicks in during times of high stress. Both are natural responses to stress stimuli, which are designed to keep us safe from peril and are hard-wired into our genetic make-up. Even though these days we don’t find ourselves running across the savannah with a saber-tooth tiger hot on our heels, the impulse still tends to rear its ugly head at the worst possible time, causing us to choke when we least expect it.
Since one bad trade can make it seem pointless to get out of bed in the morning, understanding the finer points of trading stocks online can give you the same boost of confidence that our primordial ancestors must have experienced when they became full-fledged hunters who stopped running from the saber-tooth tiger, and turned to confront the beast head on.
Whether you choose fight or flight depends partially on your instincts, but it also depends on your level of training. So you will need to hone your training in order to become a successful hunter in the online stock trading jungle.
Mastering a method
The key to successful performance in any career is training. Understanding the basics of blackjack is what allows the professional gambler to try his or her hand at the tables; and it is a fundamental understanding of football that makes truly great quarterbacks memorable.
If you want your online day trading game to measure up to other top performers in the field, then understanding a specific method is the key to success. Markets are not controllable there are too many variables but method & systems are. Most traders they jump from stock to stock style to style, method to method every day of the week. So you end up having no way to define market opportunities and categorize them based on probabilities. Finding a style that works for you and then learning it in detail every microscopic detail. We trade momentum stocks and then have defined setups within that method. When I get a new trader the first thing after class is they go on simulator and trade just 1-2 setups at a time that they know and understand. Only after mastering those setups do they add more to their arsenal. THIS IS THE KEY TO WHY NEW TRADERS FAIL! They jump guru to guru, chatroom to chatroom, scan to scan looking for the holy grail when in reality there are dozens of ways to make money trading. They key is to define your method and then master it. That takes 6-12 months. Those repetitions and competence that you build is what will give you confidence!
Bulls on Wall Street offer actionable advice you can use
If you really want to stop the losses then your first focus needs to be on defining your method and then learning everything you can about it in a step by step way. This is what we teach in ourBootcamp. For 60 days we teach our students everything there is to know about trend trading. From there we put them on a simulator and have them trade just like they would in real life. That practice of being able to identify setups and stick to your method with live data is huge so that when you do trade real money you have seen an experienced these situations and can quickly identify what to do.
Performing well under pressure is the first step in performing well as a day trader. So relax, take a deep breath, and make that fist trade of the day with confidence, knowing you have the information you need from the Bulls on Wall Street Bootcamp.
