The Pleasure Of Tuning Out The Negative
"How satisfying it is to dismiss and block out any upsetting or foreign impression, and immediately to have peace in all things."
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
Today's meditation is very interesting and I believe that as traders, we too should be "tuning out the negative."
Stressing or worrying about how a trade will turn out, is something that we simply shouldn't be troubling ourselves with, as it can put us in a negative mindset and we cannot control the outcome of an event anyway, which makes it a totally pointless exercise! So why worry about something that we cannot control? What we can do however, is react to what we are seeing during a trade and control our loss, should we need to.
We make an informed decision, placing our initial trust in the stats/data that we have available to us, which gives us our edge, because we know that we will be right, many more times than we will be wrong. If a potential selection fully meets the rules/criteria for our strategy, we will enter the trade, adopting a neutral mindset and one of two things then happens. Either our trade goes as planned and we take our pre-event targeted profit, or we see it going against us and we take a controlled loss at our pre-agreed exit point, before it becomes unmanageable. This means that we are protecting our trading bank, which keeps us in the game for the next battle.
I have touched on how we can't change things that are out of our control, quite a few times, when writing these daily journals. This is one of the Stoic philosophies too and it is a useful tool for us to be able to use, when we are trading.
Ensuring we avoid negativity, fear and doubt, means that we can remain "in the zone" with a positive mindset, ready for what the market decides to throw at us and react accordingly, in a heartbeat when necessary.
So, embrace "the pleasure of tuning out the negative," which in turn will develop a much more peaceful trading mindset for you to be in, as you evolve on your trading journey.