Mistakes.

My friend Teresa has always told me, “Learn from your mistakes, learn from your losing trades.” She still says this any time I or somebody else shares about a bad trade. And in response to her I always asked myself, “How the hell can I learn from my red trades? What the hell she is talking about?” But, I never asked her for more of an explanation, never. And I never learned from my mistakes until I found how to do that in this book. It became so easy to understand, to read and look for mistakes after I read lesson #3, amazing. Who knew?

"Consider embracing your flaws: every losing trade is there to teach you something."*

Ever since I embraced the idea that I should work on my losing trades it got so easy and simple to go back and look for my mistakes. Sometimes I found very big mistakes that I was a ashamed of, but other times I saw that I missed something and I learned. I found some little mistakes that I kept repeating with every losing trade, and this discovery led me to correct some of those small mistakes.  This made a huge difference for me. By checking these moments, I also learned to make a better check list for future setups. Every single trade since then has been checked to see if I missed something, or if I was pushed to do something that I shouldn’t have done. From that moment I realized what Teresa meant by learning from your mistakes, what she was trying to teach me.  I guess it’s better late than never, right?

"Either way, your losing trade is never a total loss as long as you embrace it and learn from it."*

At this point my journal started to have a lot more information in it. Not only about each trade I plan to make, but also information about what I see before and during this trade, and of course just after it is done. If this trade was a losing trade then I was looking for an answer to the question WHY, to explain why it was a loser. If it was a winning trade then I was looking for good things I did, to make them visible to myself and to be able to repeat them the next day, and then over and over again afterwards.

"...the research of James Pennebaker suggests that giving voice to stressful events—in a journal or out loud—for at least a half hour a day is instrumental in our putting those events into perspective and moving beyond them."*

*LESSON 3 The Daily Trading Coach 101 Lessons for Becoming Your Own Trading Psychologist by Steenbarger, Brett N.