Winning Trader is Patient Trader

Hello friends, like every forex trader on Earth, I sometimes ask myself what are my strengths and weaknesses? How have I changed, and what qualities have I developed in myself? Today we're going to talk about how you can develop it. How susceptible are you to impatience?

Impatience in ordinary life.
But what does it mean to be able to "delay making a decision"? For me, it means handling things calmly and being disciplined. I don't have to do rash things right away and can bide my time for action. This is equally true for trading as it is for real life.

Wait until you get a good discount for something you've wanted to buy for a long period of time. After all, there are many things that seem to be needed, but their purchase may well have to wait until the seasonal sale.
This behavior, also called "delayed gratification," protects me from making hasty and emotional decisions. I would not be satisfied if I bought something recklessly, only to get the thing right away but pay a high price for it. My focus is on the risk/reward ratio. So, the risk of making a bad decision is relatively low.

I think it's not easy to just wait it out these days. The sensitivity to consumption and the wide variety of offerings makes it difficult to refrain from buying something right away without waiting out the right situation. Due to the ability to pay in installments, people are able to buy expensive items right away. Many people spend money on rash decisions and get into debt just because they can't wait.

Several years ago, I read Daniel Goleman's book “Emotional Intelligence”. Among others, he described long-term experiments with children who became particularly successful and incorruptible if they learned at an early age about delayed decision-making.

The essence of the experiment was this: a child was offered a candy and told that he could eat it now, and if he didn't eat the candy right away, but waited twenty minutes, he would get two candies. So, those children who agreed to wait, then in adulthood were much more successful than fans of "fast" candy.

What does this mean for the trade?
I think delayed gratification has several positive effects on trading.
You have to wait out the right situation and you have to refrain from recklessly entering the market.
You must wait for the perfect set-up that will execute according to all the rules.
You should not take profits too early, and should calmly wait and close a position only when your rules allow you to do so.
You must be firmly aware of when you should not trade and when your individual trading strategy will not be profitable.
You must control your risks to stay in the game.

You must know that you can only succeed in trading in the long run and that you cannot get rich quickly.
Nowadays, I have begun to notice that I am primarily looking for reasons NOT to enter the market. It is only when there is no reason to trade that I open a position. The market no longer pressures me, and I try not to be influenced by my emotions. I have to wait for the right setup and the right conditions. The emphasis is on first-class odds, not second-class and beyond. All you have to do is wait it out.

Another point that is never talked about. It's pushing through situations. Here's an example: you have an open position and it has reached a stop loss. You want to win back, and at the next signal you enter the market with bigger lot position. Again, you take a loss. You follow your emotions and open in the same direction with an even bigger lots, without even waiting for your strategy signal. You probably already know the end of the story. This is a push-pull situation, when you're trying to have some kind of impact on something you can't influence.

Exercise
Instead of describing any self-evident conclusions from the above, I offer you a simple exercise, which allows you to understand whether you have developed the skill of waiting or not.
Take an hourglass, for 3-5 minutes (no less), turn it upside down, and just watch the grains of sand pile down into the empty half of it. Your task is to wait until the last grain of sand falls down. Do not try to control your thoughts.

So, after you've completed the task, remember what thoughts and emotions you had while you were watching the sand? If you were starting to get mad at how slowly the sand is falling away, you were trying to figure out how much time is left, you were cursing to yourself about this "stupid task" that doesn't let you see pictures of cats, you were remembering how many important things you have to do today, or even failed to wait until the sand falls to the other half of the hour congratulations. You have a problem with patience. But if you calmly waited for the last grain of sand, you had no desire to speed up the process in any way, you just watched the sand until the very end without emotion or irritation. You don't have a problem with patience, at least not obviously.