Stoic Joy
"Trust me, real joy is a serious thing. Do you think someone can, in the charming expression, blithely dismiss death with an easy disposition? Or swing open the door to poverty, keep pleasures in check, or meditate on the endurance of suffering? The one who is comfortable with turning these thoughts over is truly full of joy, but hardly cheerful. It's exactly such a joy that I would wish for you to possess, for it will never run dry once you've laid claim to its source."
— Seneca, Moral Letters
As today's meditation says; "Stoic joy" isn't about being bubbly or cheerful when times are good. It goes much deeper than that and it is a deep state of being. It is what we feel inside us and has little to do with smiles or laughing.
I would like to think that I am a positive person and I have a happy go lucky nature. To me, life is far too short to be going about my business being unhappy, miserable, worried about what will happen next etc. etc.
I have also developed this as much as possible into my trading journey too.
If you can use a set of rules/criteria for your strategies, that will determine firstly, what events that you trade and secondly how you manage those trades to completion, you are becoming consistent in your decision making. This means that you will get to a stage where it will become second nature to do the right thing when you are trading and you will be comfortable with what you are achieving. So instead of great joy when you have a great trading session and great sadness when a few trades don't go your way, you will have a nice steady contentment that you have done the right thing and taken targeted profits or controlled pre-agreed losses. So, over a period of time you are profitable because of your actions. This will also ensure that you don't become overconfident, cocky, even arrogant when trades are going your way and you then end up failing to cut short a trade that is going against you, ending up with a big loss, because you have let your guard down!
I have said in previous "daily journals" that you will have an opinion of the outcome of an event, based on the historical stats/data that you have available to you. However, once the event goes live, your opinion has to now become neutral and you have to trade what you are seeing, rather than what you expect to happen. This is where you need to either take your profit and run if the trade is going your way, or cut short the loss in a heartbeat if the trade is going against you, BEFORE it becomes unmanageable.
Having that deep state of being, when you are trading can work just as well as it can, in every day life.
So having trading joy, doesn't mean shouting from the rooftops about how well you are doing when things are going well; It's about knowing that you are consistently making the right choices and realising deep down to yourself, the joy that this brings you, from your long term trading results.