Only Bad Dreams
"Clear your mind and get a hold on yourself and, as when awakened from sleep and realizing it was only a bad dream upsetting you, wake up and see that what's there is just like those dreams."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
We can all have things that maybe we are not looking forward to in life and usually they are nowhere near as bad as we imagined that they would be. A dental check up and fearing the worst or maybe new things implemented at work and you are not sure about how it will work out! A lot of people always imagine that these things will be worse than they actually end up becoming!
As traders we cannot afford to be fearful of entering a trade in case it doesn't go to plan, or we would never trade anything and opportunity after opportunity would just pass us by! This is why we have a set of rules and criteria that must be met for our strategies. Once we have done our due diligence based on the stats/data that we have available to us, we are in a position to enter a trade and we must execute it accordingly. We are not worrying about what happens if the trade starts to turn into a bad dream, because we know that we have the confidence to be able to exit and control our loss in a heartbeat and without hesitation, should we need to. Using the stats/data gives us our edge, because we will be right many more times than we are wrong. Therefore as long as we have the correct mindset and we are disciplined to act swiftly to react if a trade is going against us, we will avoid the "bad dream" scenario by taking a smaller green, scratch or a manageable, controlled red.
So because we know our strategies inside out and back to front and we rinse and repeat this every day; meaning that we are fully conversant in what we are doing and achieving, we can avoid "bad dreams" and the prospect of creating a nightmare for ourselves.