Trading Discipline

One aspect of universal agreement among the successful trades is importance of discipline. This is probably the most worn out term in futures trading. Saying the word is one thing, truly understand its definition on an operational or behavioral level is another.

Discipline is not just the ability to develop a trading plan and to stay with it; it is also the ability to know when your plan is not working and therefore when to abandon it.

Discipline is the ability to give your futures trading positions sufficient time to work in your favour or, for that matter, sufficient time to work against you.

Discipline is the ability to trade again once you have taken a loss, to ignore extraneous information and to avoid inputs that are not related to the system you are using.

Discipline is the ability to maintain reasonable position size and to avoid over trade.

Discipline is the persistence required to follow your trading system.

Discipline, above all, is the ability to come back to trading arena every day with empty mind, regardless of whether you won ,lost or broke even the day before.

As you can see, discipline consists of many different things. Discipline is not any one particular skill. It is not  limited to placing stop loss.

Source : ‘Market Masters’ written by Jack Berstain