Are you guilty of Negative Self Talk?

I received this Daily Trading Review from one of our traders. It highlights the importance of learning to combat Negative Self Talk.

I am an (expletive deleted). I had a comeback going, at 2:20pm I was down $23 after being down all day.I was calm and selective and thoughtful all mid day and into the 2:30 hour. I lost $250 of open p&l in 30 minutes in GNC, KORS, NKE SMG I am such an A*S. It is quad witch Friday and I am tic trading GNC and KORS, all I had to do was not trade today and I would have finished my second week in a row positive, now I am flat for the week and an idiot. I went way over my stop out and I am an idiot, I was putting together what would have been 7 out of the last 10 days positive and now that is ruined because I am an idiot, the sad thing about KORS and NKE is that I was right and I couldn’t stay in the stocks, I was right and I didn’t give NKE and KORS the extra room for the shake. I am writing this review right now and watching my stocks rip up higher. It makes me sick to my stomach to watch this but this is what I deserve. RIG, I had the right idea but it didn’t look like it was going to move so I timed myself out of my position. AOL, piker stock in the middle of the range, QCOM I liked on the short side but it was wrong and I hit out. NAV was pinned to 30 for options ex. SMG I thought was going to be great but reverse when the market popped. I can’t wait to come to work on Monday but I have all weekend to think about never making a mistake like this again. QUAD WITCH SUMMER FRIDAY, and I am pressing my positions at 245 after slowly grinding back and being so calm and selective all day. TIMING IS EVERYTHING, if I had waited 10 more minutes I would have made chops in KORS and NKE There are so many lessons to be learned from today and I have all weekend to think about how to never make these mistakes again.

Things I did poorly today

I traded way too many names during the first 1.5 hours of trading, there was no reason to be trading let alone during the first 1.5 hours, I tried trading NKE and lost a bunch of times, RIG was just in a range on the open, NAV had a nice opening drive that I missed, I tried to buy the pullback but it was just above below

KORS, this stock was difficult right on the open, step back and look at the big picture

I got so obsessive when I started to make a comeback that I wasn’t thinking clearly, I worked way to hard all day to make a comeback and then pissed it away

Stick to the game plan and that nonsense doesn’t happen in KORS, NKE you can’t do anything about that, that is just terrible luck, gave it 3 pennies extra

Traded way too many tickets, and I did half of them within 30 minutes, from 245 to 315, I get that it is a good time to look for stocks but that is just unacceptable when I am trading 300 shares

Things I did well

GNC, should have made a lot more but I caught 2 pts in it, was down a chunk in it before that

I was in the right stocks, NKE, KORS, GNC

Next Week

Next week is so important for me, I have a few goals, first I want to be positive 4 out of 5 days, and I want one of those days to be Tuesday, I want to make sure to be extremely selective and that means trading 6 stocks until 3pm, I also want to trade no more than 20 tickets if I am trading with 300 shares, if I am down and not seeing anything good I want to make sure to take a break, I get in trouble when I get fixated on stocks and do not take a break, I need to put today behind me and refocus and continue to make progress and get better each day, I honestly felt like over the past two weeks my trading has improved and today the market just taught me a lesson.

Bella Comments:

let’s in the future stick with the facts and not vilify ourselves

I lost money into the close b.c of xyz
I did that b.c of 123
Next time I will not do that because of abc

have a good weekend, at it again on Monday. Honestly this is very common mistake

Do you ever watch the reaction from an elite golfer like Mickelson and Tiger being asked a negative question by a sports reporter. Tiger will appear prickly. Phil is much better at changing the negative topic but often does. It is not that these guys are being prickly or evasive it is that they have been trained to avoid negative self talk. They are elite performers. Obsessing about an errant shot two hours ago will not make them better as golfers. Replaying that negativity in their minds can make them worse. So they take the positive from the experience. And rationally build a plan to fix the negative.

We must also do this as traders. There is always a solution to your trading mistakes. When you have a bad day, correct your mistakes while not missing the positive from that trading day. We get better by building from our strengths. Spending so much energy saturated in negativity endangers missing the goodness from a trading day.

Bella

One Good Trade