Sunday 10 November 2013

A Trader’s Ten Worst Enemies

A trader’s best friends are their risk management, robust method, perseverance, self control, and passion. But…. here are the trader’s worst enemies:

A Trader’s Ten Worst Enemies

01. Stubbornness: Not cutting losses short and sticking with a trading method that does not work.

02. Arrogance: Believing that you are far smarter than the majority of market participants before their is any evidence that you really are is very dangerous.

03. Opinions: The only opinion a good trader should hold is what they believe the price action is telling them after they have done the research of historical prices. Opinions about the future are useless unless you posses a fully functional crystal ball or time machine. Trading the price action in the present moment is what leads to success and profits.

04. Bias: Getting stuck in bull mode or bear mode is dangerous and can lead to losses if you keep playing on a team that is losing day after day. Stay flexible in your trading and go with the flow you can spend both bull and bear sided profits the same way.

05. Euphoria: The moment you feel invincible and like a genius is the most dangerous moment in your trading, that is the time when the most stupid decisions are made, stick with your trading plan at this crucial moment and stay grounded in probabilities and risk management.

06. Anger: An angry trader is almost always a bad trader, the emotion usual skews the traders perspective and leads to trading out of revenge and trying to get back to even quickly after some losses. Trading bigger when you are trading badly is not a good plan at all.

07. Adding to a losing trade: Making your losing trades bigger makes you want to hold them longer and start hoping for a rebound in your losses. This is trading aggressively against the trend in your time frame and usually does not work out. The mental risk of ruin is also great when you make a loss bigger and bigger and hold it for a long time the stress can break a trader.

08. Chasing a trade: If you miss a great high probability entry and then it runs away from you it is usually a bad thing to chase it. As it runs away from your entry level the risk/reward starts getting skewed and you have to plan on what level will be the next great set up and be patient.

09. Trading TOO BIG: If you take on huge position sizes that put you at a risk of ruin if you have a string of a few losses and cause tremendous amounts of stress then you are dooming yourself to eventual failure, not if, it is just a matter of when the big trade goes very bad or the market environment changes and a losing streak destroys your account quickly.

10. Themselves: A trader’s ability to control themselves will determine their long term success more than any other thing. A robust trading system can be created after enough research and testing but even then you still have to be able to follow it in real time and through frustrating market environments. The biggest enemy you will ever face on your journey to trading success is yourself.
Source: newtraderu.com

What's Your Personality Type?

Knowing your personality type will help you get better control of your career and life as a whole. Your career strategy cannot be complete without including the importance of relationships.

Building relationships is an integral part of your professional life whether you are a job seeker, manager or entrepreneur. However, the kind of relationship and the depth of relationship you build depend upon your personality type.

Who am I?
To know your personality type, you need to ask “Who Am I”. This is the most fundamental question that has to be asked before you know others. You need to look inwards first rather than outward. Since study of personality is a difficult attempt, many people have coined many theories in this regard. “Personality” is an abstract term and you can have just a few guidelines and rest comes from your experience.

Within a individual’s major psychological subsystem, personality is the major factor that decides how we think and how we act. This is the natural instinct that we fall back on when other outside worldly forces are accounted for.

Personality Models
The most popular model to describe personality is BIG Five. This model gives an overview of everyday personalities and relates them to the work place. According to this theory, there are five major traits that describe a person’s personality. These major five traits are referred as OCEAN.

O - Openness to Experience
C - Conscientiousness
E - Extroversion/introversion
A - Agreeablenes
N - Neuroticism: Emotional Stability

1. Openness to Experience
People at the open end of this trait are highly interested in discovering and experiencing new things and are more flexible in the thinking. On the hand, people at the lower end of the line are more rigid and are of closed mind in approaching new experiences.

2. Conscientiousness
It is one trait that decides how responsible a person is in delivering his or her duties. They tend to be more diligent and dutiful towards their responsibilities for life and work.

However, people who are less in conscientious scale are less concerned about how things are done or details. They think of a bigger picture of the events.

3. Extroversion/Introversion
Being an extrovert or introvert is a personality character that reveals itself instantly. Extroverts are socially very active and do not hesitate mingling and interacting with others as they gain energy in their act of interacting with others.

On the other hand, introverts are reserved kind of people and draw energy from reflection and like to work alone or in small groups of people who they are comfortable with.

4. Agreeableness
This is the scale that measures friendliness versus hostility and it also shows interaction with others. People who are more agreeable are more trusting and modest while those who show lesser friendliness and high degree of disagreement are more suspicious and oppositional.

5. Neuroticism: Emotional Stability
Having Emotional stability is very important for developing a strong relationship. Those who are emotionally less stable or are highly neurotic tend to be less stable and tend to show more of negative emotions. On the other hand, people who are emotionally more stable have more pleasing personality and are less stressful.


Behavior and Intent
Experts say that while observing personality of a person, pay attention to their behavior and intent.

Behavior:
Behavior in a person is something that we observe in them consistently. These are the traits we observe when we first meet them or anytime thereafter too. We tend to judge their personality based on their behavior. However, a certain behavior is not driven by personality only. Thus, when judging personality, consider only consistent behaviors’ barring certain unusual behaviors’.

Intent:
Most times, people at workplace misunderstand each other and often complain that a particular person is intentionally holding back or intentionally not responding. In fact, it is important to understand the difference between the personalities because people are different from each other and are not able to comprehend the natural behavior of a colleague.

While managing teams, it is important that you understand those individual differences. A successful team is comprised of people of diverse personalities. The success lies in the power of harnessing different personalities to achieve your organization’s goals.

Conclusion:
Understanding your own personality and those around you can help you achieve success in your goals; professional as well as personal.
Source:http://www.wisdomtimes.com