The market is war. You are at home sitting in a comfortable environment and facing a monitor and click the mouse to buy or sell securities. That is all it takes to see if you win or lose the battle. No one knows what you are doing. No one knows how much your bet affects the market, you could become a market maker and move the price if there is no volume in an unpopular stock effortlessly. No one acknowledges if you make profits or lose your capital. It is all about you sitting right in front of your computer and trading in a room. However, that is how you participate in a war in the market. In fact, it is the most competitive battle in the world. It is difficult to acknowledge because you cannot see it, however, there are tons of people who feel pain, terror, or fear behind the market if they lose, on the other hand, people feel thrilled, excited, or euphoric after realizing profits. Everybody tries to take advantage of the market fluctuation and take money from the market. If you succeed, you take someone's money, if you fail, someone behind the market takes yours. In the bloodshed hostility environment, to battle/combat well and win to get ahead, you need to be strong and intelligent.
There are three types of people well described by Alber Einstein. Weak people revenge, Strong people forgive and Intelligent people ignore.
This Einstein's quote represents the general behavior of people, however, this can also apply to traders on the dot. If you are a weak trader having a weak mentality, you would like to revenge the market to retrieve money after a loss. Imagine how you feel, after losing 50% of your capital. You work for a year and save $10,000 and decided to use the capital for trading hoping to make the capital double, the next day you find out that the market price drops 50% all of sudden for some reason and lost $5,000. You worked 365 days to come up with $10,000 and it took only one day to lose $5,000. It is an excruciating and painful experience. If you are a strong trader having a strong mentality, you will forgive yourself even after the loss and control your emotion and stop feeling angry or any resentful feeling toward the market because you know that you have to be rational and should not be making emotional decisions. You know how costly your emotion could be to damage your trading outcome. You would be forced to learn to manage risks by not making the same mistakes or not gambling money. If you are an intelligent trader, not only you are aware of the timing, when to engage with the market, and when to step away just like a trader who has a strong mentality but also be able to analyze your own behavior and strategize well to confront the market. Stepping away from the market and keeping some space between the market and yourself always helps seeing yourself objectively that is the only way to analyze your own behaviors.
Emotion changes all the time, however, disciplined trader prevents it from happening. If you lose, your reaction is to immediately revenge the market to get money back. That is a normal human behavior/reaction. However, I guarantee you that you will lose again and again in the long run with the attitude toward the market. You cannot confront the market and do as you please hoping that you would get millions of dollars. IT WON'T HAPPEN, NEVER EVER. You need to be emotionally strong and you need to be smart to confront the market. Truly, to even stand on the same ground with professional traders, strategizing your trading move is a must thing to do. I usually ignore 95 percent of movements because I do not have to care what the market is doing. The only thing I care about is the price movement that moves according to my plan and evaluation. You can ignore 364 days of market movements and buy and sell only one day to make 50% profits, which is 5 times of average investors' annual return. Why don't they do that? The answer is simple. Because they cannot simply ignore all commotion. They are not patient. I believe that it is a myth that if you do more, you get more. This may apply to some other businesses, however, this won't apply to trading. To win, you need to be strong and intelligent to ignore all noises. Doing less is better than doing more to get more in the war.
