In all my years of trading and talking to fellow currency traders, I’ve noticed that newbie traders are susceptible to four main psychological pitfalls.
Hopefully, after reading this, you will be able to see them coming and stop them before they destroy your account.
Let’s take a look at each one and examine them carefully.
1. The desire to be rich
The desire to be rich manifests itself in many ways. The main ways are fear and greed and they inevitably lead to other problems.
If you think about it the majority of the issues newbies have stem from the desire to be rich. Overtrading and poor money management, for example, are crowd favorites.
Forex will not make you rich in the short term. It will likely take years before you’re trading well enough to leave your day job.
Forex is a long-term career and, if you’re successful, it can give you a very relaxed life.
If you started trading last week and you plan to quit your job in six months, because you anticipate being rich enough to buy a Ferrari, you are in the wrong industry.
2. Fear of losing
From a young age, we were conditioned into believing that success means having a lot of money. That losing money – the opposite of making money – means failure. This in turn causes people to be afraid of losing money.
Some newbies trade demo accounts for two years, never summoning the courage to open a live account. Some newbie traders with live accounts panic whenever they enter a trade and end up making rash decisions.
I think losing some money to the markets is actually beneficial. It teaches you some very important lessons. What is damaging is the fear of losing money.
The fact that you think about it increases the risk that you’ll make an emotion-based decision rather than a rational one. So get rid of those fears and worries, they will not do you any good.
The truth is you are going to lose money to the markets, it’s unavoidable. Every professional trader has lost money. Not every trade will be profitable.
The market simply doesn’t always work in your favor and, there are times, especially as a newbie, that you will be on the wrong side of a trade. If you end up blowing your first live account… so be it.
As long as you pick yourself up and try again, you will be a better trader for it. I myself blew two accounts before I started trading profitably.
3. The need to be right
Tom, who enjoys forex trading, opens his platform and enters a dumb, baseless, long trade. He targets 100 pips and has a 50 pip stop loss. The trade goes against him immediately.
It goes down, first ten pips, then twenty pips, and then thirty pips. When it reaches forty pips, Tom decides he doesn’t want to lose another trade and moves his stop loss down.
The price keeps falling and Tom continues to move his stop.
100
120
150……
Eventually Tom closes out his trade and he has lost a huge portion of his account.
Tom was not able to accept that he has taken a losing trade. He kept pushing the stop down in the hope that it would eventually turn around. The need to be right is an account killer.
4. Lack of discipline
I saved this one for last because, even though it is one of the most common and dangerous pitfalls, it is rarely discussed.
A trader who lacks discipline can never make it in this business. And many traders are guilty of lacking discipline for many different reasons.
The main culprits are what I like to call “System Jumpers.” These are traders that are constantly tweaking and changing their trading methods. They don’t realize that learning to trade a system efficiently takes time.
System Jumpers are traders who lack the discipline to stick to, and learn how to trade, a system. They try it for a week and when it doesn’t work they jump to the next system or method.
Another common action of an undisciplined trader is abandoning a perfectly good trading method.
Every trading method has periods in which it performs below average. No matter how versatile a method is, it cannot perform at peak efficiency in all market conditions. A true trader has the discipline to stick it out through the hard times.
