Successful Stock Traders Are Always Willing To Lose

If you want to become a successful stock trader, you should be willing to lose. You should take losing as part of trading and consider it as cost of doing business. You will never be 100% sure when you are trading. Trading is all about risk taking. You take calculated risk. You know nothing is perfect and even if the pattern that you are trading is perfect, it can fail.

There are two types of investors out there today (and yes this is an extreme over-generalization):

1. Those who spend all their time obsessing over the next 5-10% correction and when it will happen.

2. Those who are becoming complacent to the risk of a correction or a bear market.

Both stances are potentially dangerous because they set you up to over-react to the market’s movements. One of the first things you have to realize as an investor is that to earn a respectable return on your capital, you have to be willing to lose money on occasion — sometimes a lot of money.

What you need is to master the art of risk management. Your investing system should be able to catch the big moves in the market with small risk. For example if you are risking $10, you should be able to catch a move that makes $50. This way even if you lose 3 times and win only 2 times, you only lose $30 and still are able to make $100 giving you a net profit of $70.