Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Newbie Syndrome

As expected and as posted in todays article, the crosses have begun their upmove and i feel that it would go on for a few days. Today, i would like to discuss about what i call the newbie syndrome. Most of us, when we start out, have small TPs in our minds and we all enter forex after some thorough study and all studies tell us that we need to have strict SLs. So when we start out trading, we have good TPs and SLs and we trade diligently.
With this kind of trading, we slowly accumulate our profits and suddenly we find that we have doubled our account and we feel happy and proud. But as the size of the account grows and as we make more and more successful trades, we forget our good habits and slowly fall into bad ones.

We forget that we need to have SLs, we forget that we need to set good TPs. So what do we do? We find that some of our SLs get hit and then the pair travels in the direction of our trade. So, slowly, we stop using SLs. We keep losing trades and we keep hanging on to them hoping that somewhere somehow some magic would happen and we would get back to parity on our trades. We also become greedy and start having impossible TPs. We forget the strategy that we used to make so much of profits and start trading with no strategy at all. This slowly leads to degradation of our account and one fine day, we find that our account has been wiped out totally.
The best way to make money is to be patient with our profits and impatient with our losses, but we always do it the other way around. We are impatient with our profits and we close our successful trades with very small profits. We are very patient with our losing trades and we keep waiting and waiting hoping that it would come back but the trade never comes back and it either closes out our account or someday we get a flash, understand that the trade would not come back and finally close the trade with a huge loss.

The above is the newbie syndrome and i guess many of us would have gone through it. So find out what strategies made you make a profit and stick to it. Dont change it. Times would change and your trades would keep going up and down but stick to strategy. Keep studying the market, its changes and keep analysing and keep developing new and better strategies in sync with the changing market. Analyse your new system thoroughly and make sure that it would be a profitable one in the long run before you decide to leave out your previous trading system and switch to a new one.