Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Emotional Control

Recently I have been selling off my runners after a significant run. Now there is nothing wrong in taking profits when the trend has finished and the stock takes a down turn, but I have been selling my stocks when they had just done a higher low. After realising how much money I have been leaving on the table due to this issue I decided to fix it. The first thing I did was to document next time I make the mistake. The opportunity came soon.

I had taken a position in CRG and it had done a nice breakout. On 23rd it opened at 19.23 and closed at 19.18, although intraday it dropped to 18.59. Now I did the same thing I had done before. Sold it. Today it resumed its run and closed at 19.94.

Guilt as charged.

But this time I had records to see why I did what I did. I had taken a screenshot of the chart and typed my comments in it.
Here is the answer:
I was looking at the dollars I had made in unrealised profit. At the back of my mind I wanted to lock in my profits and just grab my money and run to the bank in an armoured vehicle.

The fix.
well this should hopefully fix it. I have decided not to login my brokers trading platform once I have executed the trade. I will watch my trades using Quotetracker. And in quote tracker I will not put the amount of stock I have bought or at what price. This way I will only see that days changes forcing me to concentrate on the stock's performance on that day. Hopefully I won't see the amount I have in unrealised profit and get emotional. Eventually my brain will get trained at looking the charts and not at the profit and act accordingly.


3 comments:

Brian said...

Ronin,

Yes, excellent idea. I try to look at percentage gained or lost, not at dollars. Much less emotion this way.

Brian

Ronin said...

Thanx for dropping by Brian. Great to see you.

Yeah I am trying my best, but sometimes emotions still get the better of me, but will keep trying.

Uma said...

hello there ronin, I'm a trader myself, struggling with emotional control issues....I guess the only way is to keep on trying.