5 Affirmations To Start Your Trading Day With

The life of a trader can be rather demanding. Day trading is a relatively stressful job and not everyone is cut out for it. In trading 101, new traders are often taught the how and what of the markets, but not the how and what of the mind and themselves.

Managing oneself is one of the most difficult things to do when the markets are moving and there are trades to be made. However, some of the most successful traders have very interesting routines day in and out that they follow religiously to put themselves into the right mindset to perform at their best, and maybe building one should be part of anyone’s trading 101 guide.

After all, how can you stay on track or focused when your mind is all over the place? How will you make the right trade if your mind is shrouded in negativity. Let’s cover something that many traders only learn after they’ve been in the game for years: staying positive. Affirmations are vocalizations and visualizations and in this case, they’re intended to affirm your success by staying positive.

1) My Mindset Is Everything

This one is something many new traders tend to lose track of. In the end, trading is largely as much of a mind game as it as a game of probability. Execution of a plan is so vital in trading as losing sight of what was planned is the first step down a slippery slope to losing all semblance of control and discipline.

It doesn’t matter if the method is based on high probability – if the mindset is weak, the execution will be weak too.

2) Fake It Until You Make It

Believing in becoming successful is a key component to becoming successful. Aligning your mind to this is important as it will fill you with a drive and desire to achieve. If you want to play with the big leagues, you need to act accordingly. Telling yourself that you’re going be a top dog is as important as telling yourself you’re going to play like a top dog.

3) There’s No Luck, Only Probability

Far too many traders believe that all their trades should be winning trades, with even more believing that it’s possible to never have a losing streak or maintain some crazy rate of 80% profitable trades. It is proven scientifically that it’s neigh impossible to predict the market in any sort of reliable fashion.

All there is, is chance. Vocalizing this and remembering it is critical to blowing away unnecessary ego or overconfidence.

4) Stop Loss Measures Protect My Money

There should always, with no exception, always be a stop loss measure in place. It doesn’t matter if the position is a hundred bucks or a thousand, use a stop loss. The amount of accounts that have been driven to bankruptcy could easily be halved if their traders had been smart enough to enable a stop loss measure.

There are a variety of ways to use stop losses effectively, all of which are easily researched. Stop losses will let you sleep easy and take stress off your shoulders. Not using one is, well, your loss.

5) Lions Don’t Concern Themselves With The Opinion Of Sheep

News and online forums are, for the large part, useless to you as a day trader. News are often over-analyzed and have very little of value to offer you. Relying on news is a quick way to overcomplicate your life.

The legendary Ed Seykota himself explains that he doesn’t care little for news. He only cares for long-term trends, current activity and picking a good exit point. That’s it, that’s all – anything other than that is noise.