Lesson Learned; Trade Happy My Friends

It took years to learn the lesson and here are 8 steps you should take right now to trade successfully.

I remember it was 2008. The stock market had crashed. Life as we knew it and the world would never be the same. Basically the world was over. Every trader I knew was freaking out. And Apple had fallen to around $80. I don’t remember what it was before the crash, but I think it was around $400.

I was tough though. I took a $1000 of my money and a $1000 of a friends and bought 10 shares for each of us. We were going to make a lot. LOL

OK, I was not so tough. I hung out in a lot of trading chat rooms. They were ruled by people screaming in their post (text filled with fear so loud you could hear them screaming) that it was the end of the world and the market would never recover. The one thing that was a common post or thread was everyone was sure AAPL would go to $40. I couldn’t take it. I sold it. Little did I know, I had bought it at the bottom. The world recovered, the market recovered, and recently AAPL had a 7 to one stock split. When it split it was valued around $684 a share. That was about 8 times what I had bought and sold it for, I think I lost $4 a share. If I had held it. I would have made $600 a share. Did I learn my lesson? Not yet, but recently I figured it out and learned it.

Here are the steps you can take right now that I finally learned.

1. Don’t try to find your pot of gold in one trade. Trade a very small size that you can laugh and stay happy even when it goes against you.

2. Keep it simple. Find a set up that works that is easy and is repeatable. Even a simple trend line with support and resistance can work.

3. Trade an instrument that does not die, but has lots of time and can live as long as you need it too. Options decay and die. I don’t trade them. They just don’t work for me. They might for you, but they do not make me happy.

4. Again, quit looking for the pot of gold. It’s buried at the end of the rainbow and no one except the leprechauns know where that is.

5. Don’t listen to people that say you could have made this if you traded that. Especially if they are trying to sell you a course or setup. They have no clue what you could have made. They don’t know what size your account is. When they say you could have made $3000 on a trade, you might have had to have had a $300,000 account to do it. Don’t listen to them.

6. Go into your cave and think about what you already know. Even people that have never traded know a little about trading. Up is up. Down is down. Buy low sell high. Buy above support sell when you have profit. See easy.

7. Cave again,,,, go in there so far deep you can’t here the people screaming the end of the world is here and the market is going to crash. Remember if it does, step 1, trade small=happy.

8. Can you laugh at trades as they zoom even when you are not in them or do you get upset that you were not in the trade. Learn to get all giddy even if you were’t in it. Just because you aren’t so dumb after all and you were able to spot the setup.

The lesson is Trade Happy My Friends…. Learn to laugh when the market goes up or down. You will find when you trade happy, you will be a success. If you trade all stressed out, you will be ruled by your emotions and loose.

Trade Happy My Friends