Articles for category: Psychology

SniperElite

Gifted or not?

There are some truly exceptional expert traders out there. Dan Zanger is such a person. He’s turned 10K into 18Million in 18 months. I shan’t be giving a list of similar persons. Google is your friend. Many a struggling trader will say or think to themselves, “These people are just gifted; it’s in their genes!” ...

SniperElite

Desirable core psychological characteristics for traders

The following is my reflection on the characteristics of successful traders. I do not go into long explanations on each of these. Some of these overlap each other: Toughness and resilience – taking the hard knocks, not being crushed by failure, rising again, facing reality. Determination – a refusal to accept defeat. Probably a double ...

My personal mantra

The following is my personal mantra. It lives on my desktop. It is updated on my desktop as necessary. Others may modify to suit their individual needs, as this is not prescriptive. READ AND REPEAT THIS A FEW TIMES PER WEEK. Whilst all of the following may seem very simple and logical, they represent all of ...

SniperElite

DEMOPHOBIA

Cutting to the chase quickly, this is about fear of demos. What’s a demo?  A demo is a demonstration item, appliance, facility or whatever – it doesn’t really matter. Yes I know ‘demophobia’ has another formal meaning. I’m using here to refer to demo accounts only as defined in the infographic below. I’ve now come ...

SniperElite

Winning more on demos?

There’s a curious situation that can arise where, you begin winning more on demo accounts than on live accounts, and it has been bugging me. The screenshot below is from my demo account and it should be obvious why this is bugging me. BTW I’m not just talking about the sums of money won – ...

Indecent proposal

I’m very much a student of human nature. That often leads me to conversations with people on all sorts of things. My story today is motivated by a few things this week. Firstly I had yet another brief conversation with a taxi driver. He took me from home to my local train station. I was ...

Profit from panic?

The chart below is most interesting and amusing. Clearly a bunch of people thought that this stock was gonna collapse so they put in orders to sell at the earnings release. They got it wrong. Read on. The one hour chart shows the madness better. But why did price decide to rise at the bottom ...

Tools – not fools!

The tools referred to here are ‘physical’ things – as against ‘psychological’. This is about some of the stuff that could be of use in learning or live trading. The quality of your tools matters much to the quality of your learning. And of course it goes without much saying that if you don’t invest ...

SniperElite

Respect the indices

It’s been puzzling me for some time why some seemingly good shares don’t rebound or don’t rebound well. I think I’ve solved part of the puzzle. The charts below show the influence of the German DAX (Germany 30). Of course the influence is not direct or always consistent. Wall Street also has major influence (and ...

SniperElite

The money is not yours until you take it

The scenario below is only relevant to: Where your target has not been met. When your target has been exceeded. Yes – trailing stops do help –  and you can leave a trailing stop to make the decision, which would be ‘your decision’. But the point of this is to say that positive equity hides ...