To Be a Successful Trader, Trade Without Fear: Prakash Joshi

“Trading is all about perceiving an opportunity and flawlessly executing it.”

It is relatively easy to perceive an opportunity but the execution is the real deal. You see a great trade setup but don’t execute it. And after a few days, the trade went exactly the same way you thought. Now you agonize over all the profit you could have made.

Your ability to execute your trades is a result of the amount of fear you generate or the lack of it. Many traders see opportunities but can’t execute their trades properly.

Most traders trade with fear. They intentionally or unintentionally aim to avoid losses. In the pursuit of avoiding losses, they create more losses.

Unless you learn to trade without fear, you can’t make consistent money in the market.

Fear narrows your focus of attention and restricts your mind to receive any information that is threatening.

When you trade with the fear of losing money, you avoid every information that is threatening to what you believe.

I will try to explain this using a simple analogy of learning to ride a bike.

When you are learning to ride a bike, all the environmental information is available and perceivable but you don’t notice it. You fear falling from the bike and creating some sort of accident. So all of your focus and attention goes to avoid falling at all costs. You don't do it intentionally, it's your subconscious mind acting on your behalf. You reject every information that’s coming to you from the environment. Because if you focus on other environmental information, you are likely to hurt yourself.

But as you learn to ride the bike and become comfortable, you open yourself to perceive all the other information. Now you can see signs around you, people around you, and buildings around you.
It is not as if they were not there before. They were but you didn’t notice them because you were acting out of fear.

Imagine a man walking through the jungle and he sees a tiger. Instead of fearing and running away, he keeps walking towards the tiger. Now he is dead. Fear is a natural reaction to perceived threats. Its purpose is to avoid situations or things in the environment that are threatening.

Fear is a dominant human emotion that protects us from dangerous and threatening situations in the environment.

But the market is different. If you trade out of fear, your brain will block out any information that might be threatening to your belief. When you trade without fear and completely trust yourself, you accept whatever information the market is offering about itself.

The market neither takes money away from you, neither will it give you. It only gives you information to act on. The more you learn to trade without fear, the better you can make an assessment of the conditions and perceive more opportunities.

And, More opportunities = Better Chances of Success

Article by Prakash Joshi.