Mistakes and Missed Opportunities

I want to write about mistakes and missed opportunities it is an aspect of trading that I have suffered or endured throughout my learning process.

On the subject of mistakes, I am assured (nearly every day) that the best of the best make mistakes, and that it should be a negative outcome but instead a brilliant opportunity to learn what you did / what went wrong.

I find my main source of mistakes is either trading when I have other things going on, in life or in my mind. Also being to close to the action eg; missing the wood for the tree’s.

The way that I am trying to accept in my mind is that mistakes are natural and if you will the price you pay for success, whilst I perceive them as  inherently negative it is how you react to a mistake that defines whether it is negative or a positive process.

Allow me to explain… If you make a mistake, analyse what you did wrong (or what happened in the market) analyse what you should have done, analyse why you made the mistake and address the underlying issues present in your psychology and approach to ensure that you will recognise the situation again when it occurs – then how can that be negative?

I am not fully there yet though in my mental process, it is human to look at a mistake as negative and it will take me time to accept it. What I have found then is that I will stop trading even for a short while to get my thoughts and decisions on paper rather than to leave them untill the end of the day. Often when the facts are imn black and white they dont seem as bad as they are in your mind and for me a trading diary is a must. Although cringeworthy it is tremendously confidence boosting to read the mistake you made when starting, and that you haven’t repeated them (well all of them!)

The second point that I want to touch on is missed opportunities. I have realised that every a cray cannot possibly act of every single opportunity to trade and when you are feeling bad about an opportunity that you have missed then you will either miss the next few as your mind is closed to new opportunities, or think that the opportunity still exists or just to jump into something on tilt.

My thanks go to Matt and the whole crew, and also several books that I have digested (and still read regulaly) on these two subjects which I find are major pitfalls in my psychology.

Thanks for reading