The Key Essentials to a Trader’s Psyche #5:Recognizing That Success Means Consistency

In order to develop the right mindset, to have a trader’s psyche, you need to know what to expect when day trading. You must be prepared for a variety of emotions so that you can monitor them instead of letting them control you. Only by staying on top of your emotions can you stay focused on the key to successful day trading: maintaining a consistently profitable long-term strategy in the middle of many smaller short-term wins and losses, even when these short-term outcomes seem overly distracting. To keep that focus, develop the traits of a trader’s psyche in yourself.

Successful traders know that success means consistency more than it means immediate profits. Of course traders want to make money, but to do that consistently, you may have to learn by dealing with setbacks and unimpressive gains. The trick is not only to make money off of trades but to learn WHY you made that money. And if you simply get lucky now and then, you haven’t learned anything you can turn into a consistent strategy of success over a career, or even a lifetime, of day trading.

That’s why successful traders bank on consistent profits. They know that ignoring the small-profit trades and angling for a “grand slam” is a sure way to lose money. No one can repeatedly predict huge gains on any one trade. But many people can and do predict a host of small-profit trades that create the same, if not more, profit than people who get extremely lucky once or twice.

Besides, you know that your system is working well if you can almost always profit, even on a small scale. You know you’re working in the right direction and only have to revise your plan to increase profits rather than starting over completely. Someone who depends on making a “grand slam” does not have that same insight and is essentially just gambling.

For that reason, it is vital to understand that successful traders recognize that a “good” trade has nothing to do with profits or losses. Evaluate your trades on whether or not they followed your trading plan to the letter. Even if you do lose money, as long as you stick to your plan, you have made a “good” trade. At the end of the week or month (or whenever you reevaluate your strategy), you can look at profits and losses, but you will also be looking at overall trends. And tweaking trends rather than reacting to individual trades is much more likely to help you develop a consistently profitable trading career.

If you can integrate these insights into your own psychological mindset, you’ll gain a sig­nificant edge in the market. I can’t stress this enough: the right mindset is one of the keys to investment success, and most traders fail to understand this.