If you know the pitfalls of trading, you can easily avoid them. Small mistakes are inevitable, such as entering the wrong stock symbol or incorrectly setting a buy level. But these are forgivable, and, with luck, even profitable. What you have to avoid, however, are the mistakes due to bad judgment rather than simple errors. These are the deadly mistakes which ruin entire trading careers instead of just one or two trades. To avoid these pitfalls, you have to watch yourself closely and stay diligent.
Think of trading mistakes like driving a car on icy roads: if you know that driving on ice is dangerous, you can avoid traveling in a sleet storm. But if you dont know about the dangers of ice, you might drive as if there were no threat, only realizing your mistake once youre already off the road.
One of the first mistakes new traders make is sinking a lot of wasted time and effort into predicting legitimate trends. Traders can use very complicated formulas, indictors, and systems to identify possible trends. Theyll end up plotting so many indicators on a single screen that they cant even see the prices anymore. The problem is that they lose sight of simple decisions...