What would your equity curve look like if you could redo every losing trade that was a result of:
- Deviating from your plan,
- Carelessness, or
- Mind chatter that took you out of the zone?
How much better would you be feeling about your trading account? Do you want to make a bet your equity curve would look differently, and in some cases, a lot differently? Do you want to wager the profits on your next trade that your feelings about your trading would be altered substantially?
Let’s go back
Now think about how you responded to your losses when thoughtlessness happened:
- Did you assume complete responsibility for your losing trades?
- Did you try to identify how you might change your perspective, attitude, or behavior?
- Or did you look at the market and wonder what you might learn from these losing trades?
- Did you look to see how to prevent such a thing from happening again?
Do you see the difference? In one instance you look inward to see how you can alter your trajectory and in the other, you look to the market.
In one instance you look inward to see how you can alter your trajectory and in the other, you look to the market.
I’m sure you have figured this out by now but the market has nothing to do with your propensity for recklessness. Nor does it have anything to do with the blunders you make as a result of some internal conflict, your mind chatter. Probably one of the hardest concepts for traders to embrace is that the market doesn’t create your attitude nor your state of mind; it simply acts as a mirror reflecting what’s inside back to you.
If you are confident, it’s not because the market is making you feel that way. You are confident because your beliefs and attitudes are aligned in a way that allows you to take responsibility for the outcome. Conversely, if you’re angry and afraid, it’s because you believe to some degree that the market creates your outcomes, not the other way around.
Take Responsibility
Not taking responsibility will keep you in a cycle of pain and dissatisfaction. If you are in denial about who (or what) is responsible for your outcome you will never feel the need to grow or 
change. Or you’ll assume the solution to your problems is learning more about the market and the path of your learning is thrown off course. You deflect harsh self-criticisms and alter the path your learning should take to something that will give you temporary relief.
Here is a quote from Mark Douglas’s book, Trading in the Zone,
“If you want to change your experience of the markets from fearful to confident. If you want to change your results from an erratic equity curve to a steadily rising one, the first step is to embrace the responsibility and stop expecting the market to give you anything or do anything for you.
“If you resolve from this point forward to do it all yourself, the market can no longer be your opponent. If you stop fighting the market, which in effect means you stop fighting yourself, you’ll be amazed at how quickly you will recognize exactly what you need to learn, and how quickly you will learn it. Taking responsibility is the cornerstone of a winning attitude.”
We’re the Plan in “Plan your Trade and Trade your Plan” – TraderJanie
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