Fear is the biggest threat to successful financial spread betting.
Financial spread betting can get very emotional. Wins, loses, some big and some small. Regrets about not letting winning trades run or pain over leaving loosing spread trades to late.
Successful financial spread trading involves erasing all trace of emotion from our trading decisions.
The fear can have a real effect on our financial spread trading performance. Consciously or unconsciously we have or will fear something when financial spread trading. Fear of loss, fear of success – this is possible – fear of missing a great trade, fear of making a wrong decision, fear of starting to trade.
How can we overcome our emotions in the trading environment?
Some fear is a good thing as it prevents reckless trading decisions. It should stop us from getting over confident.
Who is it spread betting? YOU. You will always be in control. You choose when to enter a trade and you choose when to exit. You are not forced to enter a trade.
If you are in control then you can only fear yourself.
Nothing can happen that you don’t control.
You must remain completely emotionally detached. Never get involved with the hype. This is much harder than it seems. You must learn to ignore everything in the papers and on the internet. Concentrate on your method of trading.
The market can not hurt you. You set how much you might lose and you are in control. You know what your maximum loss is in any trade. Loses should never exceed your predetermined comfort levels.
You will never succeed as a trader without experiencing losing trades. The are inevitable, so you must embrace them without resentment. The best traders in the world have will have had losing trades, some of them massive! But, they win out in the end. This is possible by learning by mistakes and good money management.
Fear is a real barrier to successful trading. You should not ignore this. Record trades and learn from mistakes. They will always happen.
“There is nothing to fear but fear itself”; Franklyn D Roosevelt