What's the Biggest Reason Why Traders Fail?

Why do so many traders fail?

  • Being undercapitalized

    Votes: 13 26.5%
  • Not having a trading plan

    Votes: 15 30.6%
  • Lack of discipline (eg. too emotional and not following a trading plan)

    Votes: 20 40.8%
  • Lack of knowledge or experience (eg. either too dumb or too arrogant)

    Votes: 15 30.6%
  • Lack of focus (eg. jack of all trades, master of none)

    Votes: 11 22.4%
  • Poor money- and risk-management (eg. taking on too much risk)

    Votes: 26 53.1%
  • Impatience (eg. always getting in and out too soon)

    Votes: 13 26.5%
  • Overconfidence (eg. IT'S DIFFERENT THIS TIME!!!)

    Votes: 16 32.7%
  • Being emotionally tied to the stocks

    Votes: 8 16.3%
  • Being emotionally tied to the market direction (eg. alway bullish)

    Votes: 8 16.3%

  • Total voters
    49
  • Poll closed .
Position Bias: When you have a position on you no longer have the ability to view the market as it is. When you are riding a profit, any setback will be recovered -- the market cannot turn against me now. When you have a loss, every little blip back to your direction confirms you were right. Even when you recover 80% of a loss you cannot see that it is time to say Thank You. Position Bias breeds hoping. When you begin "hoping" the maket to confirm your position you are screwed on this trade and you at at the market's mercy. It is controlling you and you are not managing your trades.
That's because they just can't get it through their thick skull that losing is actually part of the game. It's a healthy thing to lose once in a while to keep your perspective in check.
 
After reading through this thread, Ironchef, I think you do have an edge -- you are trading small and winning small. You just struggle with the emotions even at "no real risk" trading. If you can conquer that and can develop the confidence to relax I think you can do it on a bigger scale.

Well, that’s a tall order. Overcoming human emotions in trading is the hardest part itself. I would venture to say it’s the biggest factor why most traders fail, even for those with real edge.
 
Well, that’s a tall order. Overcoming human emotions in trading is the hardest part itself. I would venture to say it’s the biggest factor why most traders fail, even for those with real edge.

i agree human emotions in trading is hard to control. i used to get heartburn managing trades until one day, i decided to write an algo that manages trades for me. i have fine tuned it over time and am now left with the heartburn of deciding which setups to trade. LOL

cheers
toucan
 
Haha you always have heartburns one way or another. Humans will never escape from their emotions. Otherwise, we cease to be humans.

That’s why I agree algo trading has a huge advantage over discretionary manual trading. But most of us don’t have the ability to program algos. That itself is not easy either.
 
"So are you implying that making $200k from $1M is more difficult than, say, making $20K from $100K or $2K from $10K?"

Incorrect, you are going in completely the wrong direction, murray turtle gets it, but that's what happens when you come from a more rudimentary background looking up and choose not to listen to people who are willing to share more 'insightful' knowledge, by having HNW lifestyle and capital to match it means making 20% per year is relatively straightforward, as is with almost everyone in trading, having less lifestyle and less capital means their probability of making 20% per year decreases massively.

So some try with just the capital and wonder why they lose $100,000s, most try with neither lifestyle nor capital and wonder why every time their capital evaporates, that's the 14yr journey that people go through, now if you know UHNW methods you can make the same $ amount in returns per year using 1/5th the capital of HNW, this is a simple fact of finance - if you don't like it you should go back to your day job, if you know sovereign you can do it with 1/10th the capital, you see most people don't understand the pure simplicity of life.

Most sovereign countries need 200% per year to balance the books, a continent needs 500% per year to balance their books, now many people I've known say I have a luxury problem and like these forums go down the road "let's abuse anyone who might know what they're doing", coming from a HNW background it made everything easier, you're kind of born to generate $150,000-$200,000 as base by your mid 20s, took a long time to understand that's a rare event, and longer to understand even fewer are willing to share that information, like it's some great secret because they took the hard road to get there, it's not.

The problem is getting to higher levels and beyond in lifestyle, the capital is secondary because you can generate 20% per year with fractional amounts, but for most people that's the whole problem because they are trying to leverage too little capital with too little knowledge which can only work when you have too much knowledge, and that's how you recover massive third party losses or seed new hedge funds in 1yr instead of the normal 3-5yr incubation, you temporary overlay your knowledge base on their dynamics (capital and timelines), unfortunately the simplicity of this is lost on everyone.
 
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My forte is identifying patterns. Why ? I have no
Idea. I see a great set up and 10 other traders dont.. Its weird but thats my strength. I also use stop losses.
 
After reading through this thread, Ironchef, I think you do have an edge -- you are trading small and winning small. You just struggle with the emotions even at "no real risk" trading. If you can conquer that and can develop the confidence to relax I think you can do it on a bigger scale.
Thank you for your encouragement sir.

I believe I do have an edge trading options because I have statistics, algo and logic to support it, but I am struggling to quantify my day trading methodology, so I don't have an edge there.
 
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