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.
Traders often fail to limit their losses in search of a big win. Of course, the only way you can make a fortune with trading is to actually stay in the game, and its hard to stay in the game when youve already lost all of your money. The problem is that people often feel like any loss is a failure, and so they dont incorporate a strategy for safe losses. They may feel like...