Dealing with Your Impatience

Traders Have to Cope with Two Kinds

The hardest lessons a trader will learn usually result from impatience. In day trading, you deal with two forms of this weakness.

The first kind of impatience you're going to feel right out the gate, from your first day as a beginner. Most amateurs want to fast-track their way to pro-trader glory. What they don't understand is that the true road to success is about slowing down and taking the time to learn the deep skills of day trading.

Everyone wants to progress quickly in this business. The sad truth is that most beginners lose their start-up capital—at least once. Amateurs quickly get impatient when they can't keep their profits consistent. Finding the tolerance to deal with slow progress is too hard. It's not what they expected. Then they get reckless and lose.

The realistic way to see day trading is to picture a college student earning his Master's degree. It certainly takes patience—and years—to achieve a Master's degree. Why should becoming a pro-trader demand anything less from a person?

You feel the second type of impatience when you're down in the trenches of day trading, and you're learning to wait for your intra-day signals. Intra-day trading patience is what really counts in pro-trading. You must have the ability to sit at a trade station with the focus of a lion that watches its prey.

Impatience, and all the losses that result, causes amateurs to crash and burn and give up. The good news is that, with my system, you're going to hit most price targets in the first two hours of the market. You need to be on high alert for only 120 candlesticks on the charts. Essentially, you're paying yourself to be patient for 120 minutes.

How to Control Your Impatience

Amateur Impatience

• Don't expect to trade for income until you've practiced under the wing of a seasoned veteran. And even then, don't expect to make consistent profits or income. How well you do depends on how much training you receive and how much you apply what you've learned. This is like any other profession. You get back what you put in, and in order to make a big profit, what you put in must be skillful.
• Don't try to make huge profits on one single trade.
• Don't quit your night or weekend job.

Intra-day Trading Impatience

• Get a really comfortable chair and trade in a lit-up atmosphere.
• Make sure your stocks match my criterion list (I clarify this later).
• Don't trade if you've had a couple of bad days in a row. Take a break and go back to demo-trading—practice without real money.
• Don't force trades because your target price isn't hitting. If your price target doesn't hit, then you have no trade. It's that simple.