Attachments Are The Enemy
"In short, you must remember this—that if you hold anything dear outside of your own reasoned choice, you will have destroyed your capacity for choice."
—EPICTETUS, DISCOURSES, 4.4.23
I was saying in yesterdays' daily journal, that we mustn't allow ourselves to get too attached to our trades and today's meditation confirms that "attachments are the enemy!"
If we get too attached to our trades, believing that every trade will go as planned, it then becomes extremely difficult to accept that we are wrong! This means we end up staying in our trades for too long and end up in the land of hope; praying that the trade turns back in our favour to get us off the hook and avoid a much bigger loss. I have said before and I'll say it again; if you are in the land of hope, you have stayed in a trade that is going against you for too long and the outcome can usually be catastrophic, damaging your trading bank and knocking your confidence big time, in the process!
This is 100% why we cannot allow ourselves to get attached to our trades.
It is imperative that as soon as we enter a trade, we adopt a neutral mindset and we trade what we see happening, rather than what we hope/expect to happen, based on the historical stats/data that we have used. This means that we can exit at our pre-agreed loss and we are protecting our bank and boosting our confidence along the way!
Remember, that because of the historical stats/data that we are using and the fact that we have done our due diligence, meaning each trade fully meets the rules/criteria for our strategies, the vast majority of our trades will go as planned and we will take our profit and move on.
It's the trades that are going against us that we have to cut short and that becomes really tough to do if we are attached to them, because we are not using the correct mindset, to be able to instantly react/adapt to what is happening.