So coming into December, which we’ll do later this week, it’s not uncommon for folks to become slightly reflective on how the year went in 2022. Did you meet your own expectations? Did you behave the way you promised yourself you would? And what would you like to do in 2023? How will you change your behavior. Because behavior predicts where you end up. And so I get a lot of emails from folks who lament. And I always put on in my mind, I start listening to the Lacrimosa, the eighth movement of Mozart’s Requiem Mass, beautiful piece of music.
But because I see the sadness, and I can feel it in people when they’re writing, they’re, they’re not just frustrated, they’re kind of resigned that what they did wasn’t up to snuff, they didn’t hit their goals, they had wanted to, but what ends up happening is they just can’t find themselves because of the emotional part of trading, to pull the trigger, to put in protective stops, to not over trade and to not trade too large, which has killed more traders than anybody.
So if you’re going forward and you’re thinking about what you want to do for 2023, the first place you want to look is where did you break your rules and what did breaking those rules cost you. Because what I would recommend for 2023, and you can figure this out, is find one pattern or one setup, and just stick with it. For those of you who lack discipline or want to develop the discipline, because look, the markets aren’t going anywhere. So you have a lot of time where you can kind of practice, even with real money before you have to really worry about hitting your stride. It’s not as if you can trade. And sometime in the middle of 23, the markets are just going to go away and there’ll be no IPOs, and therefore there won’t be much need for any secondary trading in those shares. So take your time to perfect your craft. You need to kind of get in touch with yourself and figure what works. A good way to do that is to pick one particular setup, one particular chart, pattern, and scour the universe for where that shows up. It’s better if you have an understanding of the fundamentals, but if you trade it small enough, probably won’t matter.
And again, we’re talking about stocks or commodity futures, and by focusing on that one pattern, you block out everything else. And that requires discipline. So having enforcing yourself to do that, you’re basically going on a diet of your mind. You’re not letting the things that otherwise would subvert your behavior and subvert therefore the results that you want. You’re forcing yourself to think, I don’t like using snipe the word sniper with trading, because it’s, it’s terribly overused. But it forces you to be patient. It forces you to expand your horizons and see what’s the universe of securities that you’re looking at to find the specific name.
And I mean, excuse me, the specific pattern or setup, I said name that was I misspoke. And the ability, the ability for you to stick to that one process over and over and over will do wonders for your confidence. It’s going to do wonders for your performance. Two, your self-esteem will go up because now you know, could look yourself in the mirror and say, I’m not a f*cking loser. I do exactly what traders do. They wait for their setup and they trade it without hesitation. Here’s the corollary. If you scoured several thousand names, right, and nothing shows up, you sit on your hands. A lot of folks this past year were forcing trades because they couldn’t find what they were looking for, but they felt they were missing out. So they put trades on, I can’t think of too many times in my 35, 36 years of experience or whatever, where I’ve done that and it’s worked out in my favor.
So that’s acting out and fulfilling an emotional need, not a financial one. So when you can get the dynamic of your financial needs and your emotional needs to converge onto that one setup, that one trading pattern, right, then you’ll be in the zone.
Anyway, I don’t want to blather on, but that’s some good food for thought. As you’re reviewing everything that happened in ’22 and everything that you want to have happen in ’23, it’s really up to you. You just need to have the will to do it. ‘Anyway, please consider subscribing, and if you haven’t already gotten a copy of the audiobook version of my book, the Inner Voice of Trading, you can get it at MartinKronicle in the top right corner. Thanks very much, folks, and I’ll see you tomorrow.’
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