The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Everybody knows the story about the vivid portrayal of a split personality. Well sometimes the market and traders can be the same. It's sometimes difficult to get consistancy in the market and being able to cope with that is important. A lot, a lot, of people on these markets blow up at some point or another and I feel the core reason for this is the inability to cope with the wild fluctuations in fortune you often see. When those fluctuations occur its easy to lose control and chase your losses. In fact what you should do is just stay right where you are, remain focused and continue to plug away. Take a look at last week.

Dr Jekyll - A great day, not a loss in sight on the whole day and things looking great. This was my first clean sweep for a little while and spirits were up.

The following day I had high hopes better trading. But unfortunately just a couple of days later; I, or the market, were wearing a Mr Hyde costume and things just unwound in front of me. I just couldn't get it together and things just headed in the wrong direction from the off and continued for most of the session.

It's easy, especially when you have just had a good day to really lose control and let rip in these situations but I know overall that my strike rate isn't terrible. So when a bad run hits I just keep on through till I reach the other side. You can see that on this day my first two hours were just horrible. I took it on the chin though and kept on going and, partly thanks to the even racing, still ended up with a profit for the day.

It would have been quite easy for me to lose control at some point and chase or push it too hard but you just have to take the rough with the smooth and accept it. I've spoken to a few traders who blew up at one point or another and nearly all of them made the fatal error of over trading or chasing a loss one way or another. Just don't go there. It hurts when things are going wrong but as long as you reamin focused and in control, by doing simple things well you should be ok in the longer term. Take regular time outs away from the screen and always have a secondary activity you can do if you are having a bad time. It will suck the tension out of you. If you find yourself swearing at the screen it just shows you are totally out of control and you will not perform. Take a time out and come back when you are in a better mindset.

My Jekyll day was great, but I was never under the illusion that it was normal and I was probably just saving up a little losing run. A couple of days later that was confirmed with my Mr Hyde performance. While it was a tough day I knew that my losing run wouldn't continue and that each loss just got me closer to my next winning run. If there is one thing you can learn from this just learn to treat each loss, not as a blot on your P&L; but just another step to the inevitable win.