Getting the Right Mind Set : Distinguishing Between Expenses and Failures

Certainly when people start to get into forex trading every little trade that doesn’t go their way seems like a gigantic failure. Definitely the reasons why this is the case are many but perhaps the most important one is that new traders do not have an approach to trading that lets them make the distinction between what is a failure and what is a normal trade that simply went wrong when everything was done “by the book”. On today’s post I will be talking about the distinction between trades that fail and trades that lose, I will define each one and I will attempt to give you some guidelines so that you can change your mindset and start approaching trading from a more business like perspective. Hopefully after reading this post you will apply this to your trading and you will find out that most of your so called “failures” are just business expenses while many of your profitable trades, are just failures.

Cataloging trades that go “wrong” and end up in losing territory as failures is easy because when we lose money we tend to feel like losers. It is therefore very normal to consider losing trades failures in the beginning. However after you have been trading for a while it becomes obvious that losing is an inherent part of long term profitable trading and that learning to catalogue losing trades differently is important to approach trading with the right mindset. In reality, when every trade is placed there is a natural probability that it may turn out to be a loser (the trade’s market exposure) and therefore when you execute everything as planned and you lose, it is just a temporary consequence of your strategy.

When you approach trading like a business, this becomes a business expense and the trade become a triumph since you planned you trade and traded your plan. This in turn makes it easier to deal with losing trades since you approach them in a very non-emotional way, simply as some temporary events that will lead to some future profitability. Therefore losing trades that are a consequence of a well laid out plan with accurate long term profit and draw down targets are not failures, they are just part of your business model.


Failures – on the other hand – are all the trades you take that deviate from your business plan. When you intervene with your plan and make emotional changes to your trading methodology or system you are indeed failing at trading because you are moving away from your “business model”. If you made a trade in which you took a decision that generated a lot of profit but that decision led to a road where the long term probability of success was unknown then you have failed because what you obtained was some profit out of some luck. Long term survival in forex trading is about having a plan and executing the plan to get to where you want to be, any deviations from the plan are failures since they lead you a road of unpredictability and uncertainty that will end up with failure.

In order to trade forex successfully I focus on trading as a business and on the trades taken by my systems as a business plan. Any losing trades that happen are merely “business expenses” and all of them are triumphs in the sense that they represent my confidence in the strategy and the business plan. I now understand that any action I take that may intervene with my strategies will deviate me from my long term profitability objective and this for me has become unacceptable since these changes constitute failures of what I want to achieve.

So in the end, loses are a natural part of trading and they will always be there. Dealing with loses is something which is naturally hard to do but you should be able to make the distinction and take loses that are part of a well laid out plan as business expenses while those trades that get you to uncharted territory should be regarded as failures. This mindset will get you on a track of long term thinking and understanding that will ultimately lead to long term profitable trading.

If you would like to learn more about automated trading systems and how you too could use them to succeed in forex trading by building your own systems with reliable trading tactics and accurate risk and profit targets please consider buying my ebook on automated trading or joining Asirikuy to receive all ebook purchase benefits, weekly updates, check the live accounts I am running with several expert advisors and get in the road towards long term success in the forex market using automated trading systems. I hope you enjoyed the article !

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