The Harsh Truth About Working in Forex

"The chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken"

Warren Buffett

 Good day, ladies and gentlemen Forex traders. Traders, and not only beginners, have a mass of destructive habits that are very difficult to knock out of their heads. Today we will consider one of the main mistakes made by many people: setting daily goals.

"Work" in the world around us consists of exchanging time for money. If you devote a certain number of hours to work, you expect to receive a certain monetary reward in return. This exchange of time for money is what most people engaged in trading are trying to avoid, and yet they stubbornly refuse to leave this psychological concept in the past when they enter the market.

In fact, trading is not and never will be a simple exchange of time for money. You can make money only when the market provides favorable conditions for this, and these conditions are not present all the time.

Trading often involves an absence of any activity at all. You could easily sit in front of the charts for several hours with no acceptable opportunity to enter the market. This concept is completely alien to most people who are used to the fact that if they go to work, their time is paid for. This mentality leads to our destructive habit: we assume that our time spent trading must be paid for.

This is the classic mistake of any amateur: to assume that if he sat down at the charts, he must immediately trade.

Here is a typical scenario:

A Forex trader set aside time for trading between 8 and 9 in the morning (or any other time). For this hour he decided for himself that he would strive to take 10 points from the market, or  500 $, or would set some other goal for his "daily work" as a trader.

Therefore he believes that if he is working, his time must be paid for, and the only way to get paid is to trade. Consequently, he is going to enter the market regardless of whether the proper conditions exist for this. But what if there are no favorable conditions? What if no real opportunity appears during this hour?

A real trader would not enter the market, but the amateur forces the trade. After all, he has a goal, and he must get paid.

The mistake is that they are trying to impose their desires, their aspirations, and their demands on the market, which is not only not interested in what you want, but does not even know that you exist. To trade successfully, you must cast off the shackles of the mindset that you need to exchange time for money. In trading, you will be paid only when the market wants to pay you.

When a trader forces the trading process so that it follows his own desires and unreasonable goals, he fights the conditions in the market and inevitably exposes himself to excessive losses. Professional traders know that they can "go to work" 5 days in a row and still get paid only on one of those days.

This is one of the main reasons why ambitious traders suffer such depressing defeats and lose money for so many years. They chase false goals. 10 points a day is the classic motto of novice traders. But that will never happen!

They want only 10 points a day. But what if they take losses on their first trade and now they are down 10 points? Now they have to make 20 points just to achieve their daily goal. Losses on the first trade immediately set back their goals, and they completely change their game plan. What if 2 trades are losing ones? They now have a new goal: 30 points, in order to realize their original goals.

Professional traders do not set goals. They know that they will get everything the market can provide them. During some days they do not trade at all. During other several days they actually lose money. Nevertheless, there are certain days when they make money in an amount much greater than they could imagine, and the amount of their income covers all those days when they simply "went to work" and received no profit.

People come to FOREX in order to get rid of the concept of exchanging time for money, and yet their psychology clings to this principle as if their lives depended on it. Until a trader can get rid of this paralyzing mental deficiency, they will never achieve success.

Successful trading runs counter to everything we are used to seeing in the ordinary world. You do not exchange time for money, and you are not paid for the hours spent on your work. You are paid from time to time, but it is enough money to compensate for all the other days.

Respectfully, Pavel
TradeLikeaPro.ru