Getting out of your trades
When you have entered a trade, your main goal is to stay in the trade as long
as it is profitable, and to get out of it as soon as you will start losing
money. Sounds really simple? Unfortunately it is not.
Not only does this involve
predicting the future, it also involves dealing with your fears;
- fear of exiting too late
- fear of losing money
- fear of doing wrong
- ...
The best way to deal
with your fears is to have a strategy, and to follow it.
Decide on your strategies and write down your actions in certain scenarios
If you will not look into the market until after the closing of the day, then
that is fine and then you have predefined a strategy for handling day time events. You still need to
decide your exit strategies for events analyzed after the end of the day (for example selling if you get a
certain amount of money).
But if you are going to look at the market, you need
to have written down how you will behave in certain circumstances, because the
market will have you jumping, sweating, betting, forgetting, ...
Thus, you need to know that if the stock is above a certain value, that is fine, you do not
care until it reaches all the way to... You also need to know what to do if it
goes below a certain price. Will you ignore it? Or act if you are in the last
hour of the day? Or if the volume is high? Or if the buyers are fading away? Or
if ...
Prepare yourself, create trust for your strategy, figure out the odds in advance
Do not try to decide all your actions and triggers while you are at the same time sitting there
looking at the prices. You need to know the odds, you need to know your plan,
and you need some solid feeling of trust to lean on when the trading starts to
move, either it is for you or against you.
In order to trust that you know what
you are doing, you need to test
the strategy that you are following.