Forex Trading Tips: How NOT To Learn From Your Mistakes

How NOT To Learn From Your Mistakes

“Good Morning Boris, that's fine we cannot win every trade,” started an email from a sub that I received this week.

“There are two points I would like to mention and will only follow if you agree:

1. I set an alarm and wake up at 4:25am when the trade was only a few pips away from the T1. If I was awake, I would have exited half as that was kind of over bought as well, would you agree?”

That's simply a matter of luck, I wrote back. We were within 3 pips of T1. You have to accept that element of the markets. You cannot try to micro manage it.

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“2. When our stop was very obvious to be hit I was watching, should we exit when we find such obvious hit, or should not worry about few pips and let the stop hit?”

We always stay in our trade even if data is wrong because often the overall trend saves us. Alas not today. Sometimes the only thing you can learn from your mistakes is that you have to accept them.

Sometimes the only thing you can learn from your mistakes is that you have to accept them…

To let things be is perhaps one of the hardest lessons to learn from trading. No one likes to tinker with his strategy more than I. I drive K crazy half the time with my never ending stream of setups. Sometimes my ideas have merit and we implement them into the BK model but if it wasn’t for K’s steely discipline and determination to stay on track I am sure the BK trading record would never be so steady.

The inclination to tweak you approach the moment a trade goes wrong is one of the most natural yet destructive impulses that we have. Trading by its very essence is the art of assuming risk. Trades inevitably lose. If they didn’t, if every trade was positive we’d all be infinitely rich. In fact when you follow the trading record of even the most successful hedge funds, the path always looks like the meanderings of a somewhat drunk gentleman – two steps forward, one step back.

The problem is that we want to associate trading with the regularity of a bi-weekly paycheck, but the reality is of course very different. Some months are feast and other months a famine. To succeed in trading we have to appreciate its inherent volatility of the enterprise. Sometimes there is nothing to learn from your mistakes, because they are not mistakes at all they are simply trades.

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