What should the psychology of the trader be?

Before placing trades, traders must sufficiently analyze the position they are about to take. However, many do not thoroughly plan out their actions, and instead make trades based on guesses and hunches. This psychological viewpoint can result in traders losing a

lot of money very fast. How can this be avoided? Through careful planning and analyses, including where to place stop and limit orders, a trader can keep losses to a minimum while allowing profits to run.

Make sure to have a plan that utilizes stop and limit levels before making the trade in order to minimize losses and lock in on profits.

One huge psychological error that many traders make is going against their original plan and either closing positions to take a profit before they reach the profit target or not closing a losing position in the hopes that the market will come back in their favor. Another psychological error traders make is to believe that every trade should be profitable. If there is an instance where a stop is hit and then the market goes back in favor of the position the trader had held, this belief can cause the trader to remove stops from their trades.

What is often forgotten is that stops are there to keep them from losing more money than they would like, not to be some sort of roadblock against profit. It is okay to hit stops and lose the pre-determined amount of money because when a trader is lets profitable trades run, the loss will be made up for and more. Do not try to improvise. Stick with the original plan and precautions made before the trade.

Another psychological error traders make is becoming too committed to a trade and unwilling to let it go. A trader must keep his original analysis in mind when seeing the result of a trade, and be objective about what is happening to his position and what he should do about it. However, many traders attempt to analyze the position differently from the original analysis so that the analysis will favor their original position. They intentionally distort their analysis for one of two reasons: they do not want to close the position with a loss or they are hoping that the position will become more profitable than it already is.

This psychological viewpoint causes many traders to lose the profit that they had made or lose more than they originally would have lost. Just because leverage is provided does not mean it is okay to trade large portions of the account at a time or too frequently. A prevalent mistake made by many traders is overtrading, meaning that they trade much larger amounts of their account than is reasonable or trade too frequently. Although leverage allows traders to trade one lot of currency with only $1,000 as a margin deposit, it does not mean that traders should trade their entire available margin in one or two trades.

The psychological mistake they are making is that they are thinking of their trade as a $1,000 investment, when in actuality it is a $100,000 investment. Although most traders perform adequate analysis of currencies before placing trades, they sometimes use too much of their margin and are later forced to exit the position at the wrong time. A general rule that traders try to follow in order to keep themselves from getting over-leveraged is never using more than 20% of the account at any given time.