Don't Hide From Your Feelings
"It's better to conquer grief than to deceive it."
— Seneca, On Consolation to Helvia
An interesting meditation today and when we look at this purely from a trading point of view, it really sends us the same message.
If we take the last paragraph from today's meditation, it sums it up perfectly, how we must react when trades go against us and for whatever reason, we don't manage to control our loss and end up with a heavy loss.
Here is the paragraph and I quote; "Focusing (on the loss) is better in the long term. That means facing it now. Process and parse what you are feeling. Remove your expectations, your entitlements, your sense of having been wronged. Find the positive in the situation, but also sit with your pain and accept it, remembering that it is a part of life (in our case trading). That's how one conquers grief."
So on reflection, we face up to our loss straight away. Process and parse; or in other words, examine the trade carefully, to understand what went wrong. Remove your expectations, your entitlements, your sense of having been wronged; we don't expect anything from the market and we can't control how our trades will pan out. We are certainly not entitled to anything from the markets from the hard work that we put in, so it is down to us to manage and react swiftly, when trades are going against us. We haven't been wronged, we basically haven't reacted quickly enough to control our loss, but we will aim to do better next time! Find the positives in the situation; after examining the trade carefully, we know what we need to do differently next time and we will learn from this mistake. Yes the loss will be painful, but we have to accept it, remembering that at times it will be part of our trading journey and of course, we then move on.
This will hopefully make us stronger and we learn from the painful lesson and try to ensure that we don't repeat the mistake.
If you hide from your feelings and bottle it up, you are more likely to go full tilt and revenge trade with potentially calamitous consequences!
Face it, accept it, examine it and move on. it's hard but it has to be addressed, so that you can become a better trader with experience. You can do it for sure.