Why do traders fail?

[smallStops]

Actually even breaking even is not easy after the costs.

Would you get out of bed ( aka do the work necessary) if the day target is break-even?

I wonder how people would trade if their end of day target was break-even ?
Obviously with the constraint of making at least one trade.

 

[cornix]

I wonder how people would trade if their end of day target was break-even ?
Obviously with the constraint of making at least one trade.

Honesty I am an adversary of setting targets. They are purely artificial element in trading and don't reflect market reality, which is: profits and losses are never distributed evenly over time.

The best "target" I would think about would be setting fixed trading hours and take every quality setup within those hours, leaving the result of trades up to the edge.

 

[Grandluxe]

WIll make sure they will never come back when they hear that.

Honestly speaking I don't practice too much lately, being busy with business in the morning and trading in the evening.

busy with your shrink business?

 

[Grandluxe]

Try twenty. People use margin, heavily, they fund their accounts with credit cards, they take out second mortgages. Granted the line between a large, weak ego and an addiction is fuzzy, and cognitive dissonance plays a role, but, yes.

I think Cutten mentioned that he funded his first account by maxing out his credit card.

 

[cornix]

busy with your shrink business?

Nope, autoparts wholesale which family of my wife is involved in for the last 20 years.

 

[dbphoenix]

The best "target" I would think about would be setting fixed trading hours and take every quality setup within those hours, leaving the result of trades up to the edge.

Exactly. One shouldn't even be thinking about the money during the session. The focus should be on trading well.

 

[smallStops]

I am not sure your approach is motivating enough.
Say you are given just one day next month to trade.
You can choose your day, but you have just one day to take the trades
you want.

For which minimum level of profits would you be willing to really
"get out of bed" for? I mean prepare really well?
and which one would you say really easy to reach?

0.1 ? 1 ? 10? 100? 1000? 10k? 50k? 100k? 1m? 10m? 100m?

 

[ammo]

It is true that there is a very thin line between trading and gambling.
Without putting safeguards, one can easily fall into gambling.

I think one thing that would help traders reduce failure rate is to determine in advance how much profits they want to make for the year, and to work on exactly how much profits they should go for, based on what they deam extremely easy to make, and what they would not get out of bed for.

every trade is a bet or taking of risk

 

[cornix]

I am not sure your approach is motivating enough.
Say you are given just one day next month to trade.

For which minimum level of profits would you be willing to really
"get out of bed" for?

Unfortunately trading is not pay per hour job, it doesn't work like that. More like a business in this sense. In our "real" business we have the same: some days are actually "down days" cause we pay salaries and store maintenance and day's sales don't cover that. But other days more than cover whole weeks in sales sometimes.

That's how it works: probabilities and averages. Not certainty. Which freaks most people out (one of the top reasons of traders failure).

 

[dbphoenix]

I am not sure your approach is motivating enough.
Say you are given just one day next month to trade.
You can choose your day, but you have just one day to take the trades
you want.

For which minimum level of profits would you be willing to really
"get out of bed" for? I mean prepare really well?
and which one would you say really easy to reach?

0.1 ? 1 ? 10? 100? 1000? 10k? 50k? 100k? 1m? 10m? 100m?

And that's why so many traders fail. You'd have more fun just going to the casino. Or playing online poker.