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The market demands that a trader follows all of her rules, every day, and every moment. Many just cannot thrive in this unbending universe.

TRADERS ASK: “WHY CAN’T I JUST MAKE MONEY?”

A good trader assumes the mentality that there is always an escape.

There is a wonderful movie, Red Belt, written by one of our great playwrights, David Mamet. The protagonist, Mike Terry, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is a mixed–martial arts instructor, and the film opens with Mike teaching his best student. This student is in a chokehold that he cannot escape. And Mike is preaching, “There is always an escape. There is no situation you could not escape from. You know the escape.” There is always an adjustment that I can make to improve my trading results for a stock. I watch my trading videos to discover what I was doing wrong, my escape. Almost always, I lose money because of my own human error. I fix my errors and move forward. When I do my trading, results immediately improve.

But to improve your results you must review your work and eliminate your mistakes.

You don’t compete by saying, “I really want to see better results.” You compete by taking the actions necessary to make your trading more profitable. The reason you are losing money is not because you are a lousy trader. That is not supported by the past five years of trading data. You are struggling because you are making human errors. Your present data is not relevant because it is blanketed with uncommon trading errors. Eliminate these mistakes and your results will mirror your previous years. Make a list of the trades that work best for you. Visualize making successful trades. Then make One Good Trade and then One Good Trade and then One Good Trade. 

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