Hey guys, was going over some of the books in my trading library that have helped me in my early trading days and wanted to share a few excerpt with you all....hopefully some may find them useful
The majority of traders spend most of their time looking for good trades. Once they enter a trade, they lose control and either squirm from pain or grin from pleasure. They ride an emotional roller coaster and miss the essential element of winning-the management of their emotions. Their inability to manage themselves leads to poor money management of their accounts.
If your mind is not in gear with the markets, or if you ignore changes in mass psychology of crowds, then you have no chance of making money trading. All winning professionals know the enormous importance of psychology in trading. All losing amateurs ignore it.
Good traders tend to be hardworking and shrewd men. They are open to new ideas. The goal of a good trader, paradoxically, is not to make money. His goal is to trade well. If he trades right, money follows almost as an afterthought. Successful traders keep honing their skills. Trying to reach their personal best is more important to them than making money.
A successful New York trader said to me: "If I become half a percent smarter each year, I'll be a genius by the time I die." His drive to improve himself is the hallmark of a successful trader.
A professional trader from Texas invited me to his office and said: "If you sit across the table from me while I day-trade, you won't be able to tell whether I am $2000 ahead or $2000 behind on that day." He has risen to a level where winning does not elate him and losing does not deflate him. He is so focused on trading right and improving his skills that money no longer influences his emotions.
The trouble with self-fulfillment is that many people have a self-destructive streak. Accident-prone drivers keep destroying their cars, and self destructive traders keep destroying their accounts.
Markets offer unlimited opportunities for self-sabotage, as well as for self-fulfillment. Acting out your internal conflicts in the marketplace is a very expensive proposition.
Traders who are not at peace with themselves often try to fulfill their contradictory wishes in the market. If you do not know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere you never wanted to be.
Trading in the Zone is an in-depth look at the challenges that we face when we take up the challenge of trading. To the novice, the only challenge appears to be to find a way to make money. Once the novice learns that tips, brokers' advice, and other ways to justify buying or selling do not work consistently, he discovers that he either needs to develop a reliable trading strategy or purchase one.
After that, trading should be easy, right? All you have to do is follow the rules, and the money will fall into your lap. At this point, if not before, novices discover that trading can turn into one of the most frustrating experiences they will ever face.
This experience leads to the oft-started statistic that 95 percent of futures traders lose all of their money within the first year of trading. Stock traders generally experience the same results, which is why pundits always point to the fact that most stock traders fail to outperform a simple buy and hold investment scenario.
So, why do people, the majority of whom are extremely successful in other occupations, fail so miserably as traders? Are successful traders born and not made? Mark Douglas says no. What's necessary, he says, is that the individual acquire the trader's mindset.
It sounds easy, but the fact is, this mindset is very foreign when compared with the way our life experiences teach us to think about the world. That 95-percent failure rate makes sense when you consider how most of us experience life, using skills learned as we grow.
When it comes to trading, however, it turns out that the skills we learn to earn high marks in school, advance our careers, and create relationships with other people, the skills we are taught that should carry us through life, turn out to be inappropriate for trading. Traders, we find out, must learn to think in terms of probabilities and to surrender all of the skills we have acquired to achieve in virtually every other aspect of our lives.
Here's a few more titles that I've also read & that may be of some help to others....
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator The Intelligent Investor Market Wizards The Disciplined Trader: Developing Winning Attitudes
