Maintain Your Perspective

Maintain Your Perspective
Every minute more than 150 Million Dollars change hands in the electronic index futures markets like the e-mini S&P and e-mini NQ. You can win or lose thousands of dollars in a few minutes; the futures markets can make you rich in a few weeks or months or wipe out your account with no mercy.If you want to compete in the "game of games" and play against the best traders in the world, then you need to get ready. Too many gamblers are entering the arena without any plan or strategy, completely unprepared, and that's why they lose.Trading a system will dramatically increase your chances to succeed in trading, because it eliminates many reasons why unprepared traders fail.A few days ago I received an email: "I have been following your strategy CoinCollector for the past two weeks, and it seems that the strategy is down by $360. Did your strategy stop working?"When trading a system you need to maintain a long term perspective. In the past two weeks the system made 14 trades. That's definitely not enough to judge the performance of a system. Trading a system means playing a number's game: You need to place at least 40 trades before you can look at the performance of the system. Most traders only evaluate their performance once a month and try to have as many profitable months as possible. Hedge Funds evaluate their performances quarterly or yearly.If you look daily at the results of a trading system it will drive you crazy. Sure, nobody likes going through a drawdown. But losses are part of our business and you need to deal with them. The famous Richard Dennis once said: "It is totally counterproductive to get wrapped up in the results.You have to maintain your perspective. Being emotionally deflated would mean lacking confidence in what I am doing. I avoid that because I have always felt that it is misleading to focus on short-term results." Many traders focus on short term results and lose their perspective.That's why they fail: They experience a loss or a bad week and shop around for the next system. And while the trading system they just abandoned is recovering from the drawdown, the new trading system might produce first losses, and they start looking for the next system.They are like the dog chasing many rabbits: At the end of the day he's totally exhausted and didn't catch a single one.Maintain your perspective!