The One Path To Serenity
"Keep this thought at the ready at daybreak, and through the day and night — there is only one path to happiness, and that is in giving up all outside of your sphere of choice, regarding nothing else as your possession, surrendering all else to God and Fortune."
— Epictetus, Discourses
Once again when you compare this to trading, it all boils down to the choices we make. This can be easily simplified by sticking to a strategy that you know inside out and that works for you. We know once a football game or a horse race starts, the result becomes out of our control. Then we have a decision to make and in horse racing it may have to be made in a heartbeat, if things are not going as expected. So although the result maybe out of our control, we can still exit our trade to avoid a much bigger loss than just letting it run and ending up in the land of hope! So as the stoics say "remind yourself that you always have a choice" that is something that can't be taken away from us. Of course with trading, our initial choices are based on the stats/data that we have available and the probability of something happening. It's a case of intervening when things aren't going to plan, so we can protect our bank.
So we need to focus on what is in our control.. Not the result but how we can cut trades short by staying in control, even though we can't control the outcome of the race or the football match. We aim to become as consistent as we possibly can as traders, with the choices that we make. We must however make these choices without hesitation, because if we allow ourselves to dither and not be decisive, we have then lost control and we could be making a huge dent in our trading bank. Practice, practice and more practice is the only way to get better at being decisive when we need to be. Know your strategies inside out, rinse and repeat as often as you can. Always be ready to cut any potential losses in a heartbeat. It won't happen that often as we know we will be right many more times than we are wrong, but one big loss will dent our confidence and trading bank too of course. Let's stay on "the one path to serenity."