Trading Video - Why Traders Hold On to Losing Positions

Humans in general grow up being taught by their environment of the importance of always being right. Those who are right are envied as the winners in society and those who are wrong are cast aside as losers. A fear of being wrong and the need to always be right will hold you back in general, but will be deadly in your trading.

How Most People Associate Profitable Trades:

How Most People Associate Unprofitable Trades:

So now ask yourself this question. If you were really the trader in this example which system would you rather have?

I can tell you from experience that the large majority of traders will take the second system without a second thought, and on top of that will stick with it even if it hits a few losses that wipe out most or all of its gains.

Although the successful trader will want to know a lot more about both these systems which we are going to learn about in the lessons that come before deciding which one to trade I can tell you that what they will glean from the above information is the following:

• Not including transaction costs such as commissions and slippage, for the first system I only need to be right 1 time for every 5 times that I am wrong in order to break even. With this in mind seeing the system trade for one profit and 5 losses is not giving the system a chance to prove itself. It would not be out of the ordinary for a system such as this to hit even 10 losers in a row and still end up profitable for the year.

As I did not give the trader success rates for the second system there is no way to know for sure but the first suspicions that the successful trader is going to have of the second system is that it is simply a system which sets tight profit targets and very wide or no stops at all. What this means is that the system is going to take a lot of small winners and a very few large losses which have the potential to wipe out all the gains in the account and possibly a lot more.

Most of the successful systems that I have seen fall into the category of the first one we looked at in that they take a lot of small losses and make their gains for the year on a few big winners. As in this example however most traders do not have the mental toughness to stay with these types of systems during the long loosing streaks and give up on them prematurely, and throwing a profitable methodology in the trash without giving it a chance.