Marks Of The Good Life
"You have proof in the extent of your wanderings that you never found the art of living anywhere—not in logic, nor in wealth, fame, or in any indulgence. Nowhere. Where is it then? In doing what human nature demands. How is a person to do this? By having principles be the source of desire and action. What principles? Those to do with good and evil, indeed in the belief that there is no good for a human being except what creates justice, self-control, courage and freedom, and nothing evil except what destroys these things."
—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 8.1.(5)
An interesting meditation today and most of what is written above, can most certainly be a comparison to what we need to do, to be successful traders.
Put in terms of living the good trading life, we must use self-control to rigidly stick to the rules/criteria for our strategies; have the courage to trust in our strategies and also in the ability to be able to make the right decisions by reacting to what we are seeing during a trade; Have that freedom to not have to trade every event possible and therefore free up our time by trading selectively, when the rules/criteria for our strategies are fully met; and finally we must abstain from the evil of jumping on trades impulsively, with no prior research, breaking/bending the trading rules that we have in place, avoiding revenge trading/trading in anger, going full tilt.
If we can do all of this, we will have the correct mindset to trade and as long as we put in the hard work, turning up every day, rinse and repeat and sticking to our rules, we will reap the rewards in the long term.
So let's get practising and get the job done with the "marks of the good 'trading' life".