Since teaching traders since a while you get to discover typical trading shapes. I see a lot of traders struggling with the effects of their emotional trading decisions and not taking the time out to look deeper into the cause of their behavior. There are inherent layers of opinion that do us see and act in sure ways.

Three Vital Mistakes Apart from the dark deep subject of trading psychology there are three basic mistakes I see again and again.

Overtrading First is overtrading. That is, committing too much to a trade. If you commit too much to a trade it will have you doing the emotional trading dance which is not very graceful getting up and down looking at the price every two minutes basically poking the trade with a stick. This can force you to take emotional trading decisions which are not rational. A right author to read on this is Mark Douglass. If you would like more information on specialists to assist you in coming to grips with your underlying trading thoughts and how to change them, email me for details.

Overcautious If you overtrade, then you will probably tend to place stops too close to the market trying to limit losses. The difficulty with this is that you get flicked out of the principal tendency. It is far more sensible to trade within your financial boundaries. To get this in perspective I recommend the author Van Tharp. He outlines correct position sizing and risk management as you need to get time on your side and understanding risk management will assist. If you work outside your risk parameters then it’s only a matter of time before your account will be in disrepair. Less is more.

Overdoing it Thirdly trading in corrections without whatever understanding of them is grievous. If we have been making money in the old friendly trend and have left with profits, we tend to have become attached to that stock and will re-enter it again for no real reason except that it’s been a good friend.

Further around corrections Corrections will collect your currency. So, learn them or avoid them. Looking at a chart in hindsight is a great learning tool as a market that has trended reveals the markets’ pattern very clearly. That is, an uptrend then a correction, then an uptrend, then a correction and so on. So all we need to do is enter after the correction has finished. Now how hard can that be?

The majority of traders simply know a little around a drift and nothing nearly corrections. Understanding the bull/bear, yin/yang, positive/negative, the profit taking, the rebalancing and repositioning of the larger players through corrections will allow you to take positions as the specialists take theirs as the trend is being engineered. This is normally seen via price and volume or both of these combined in patterns. I find Elliott has the best understanding of correctional patterns and market behavior and Gann also understood price and time. I likewise mentioned in an historical article about Trading Levels which is a bare way to handle corrections that is to avoid them.

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