Living in Arizona, each new year brings with it two significant milestones: May 15 and October 15, which is, as far as I’m concerned, the start of summer (with triple digit temps guaranteed) and the end of summer. Oh, how I cannot wait for 15 October when I can once again enjoy the great outdoors! It just can’t come fast enough for me. But then, I, like my wife and daughter, am not known for my patience. I get a lot of mileage out of teasing my wife who is a nurse practitioner, and I can’t resist telling her that she has too many patients and not enough patience! As Franklin Jones once observed you can learn many things from children…how much patience you have for instance Children seem to be purpose built to try one’s patients to the max. So if my daughter is patience stretcher number one in our house, a close second is Forex trading, an activity which, if executed properly, requires a great deal of patience.
I did a last-minute rewrite of this edition of pipsqueaks after Krystal’s Sunday update which included a training video where she brought up the point of not being in a hurry to wreck your account trying to make quick huge profits by taking on too much risk. This is great advice, and something that really resonates with me, especially since I’m a really poor example of how to be patient, although I am working on it. I was reminded of something that happened many years ago, when I was single and shared a home with a roommate named Scott.
Scott was a flight instructor in the Air Force, and as you might imagine a person who, occupying such position, would be calm logical and levelheaded. And indeed he was; however, every once in a while he’d come home with a harebrained scheme. One day he came home with some training videos made by a professional gambler named John Patrick (and whose materials are still available on the Internet). Yessiree, we were going to Vegas and he was going to make a killing. I thought this was nonsense but I just kept my mouth shut. Being that I was home more than Scott was, I was happy to avail myself of the training materials, and made quite a thorough study of them. If I remember correctly, according to John Patrick, there are only two kinds of people who go to Vegas, professional gamblers and dopes. Well, I wanted to go to Vegas but I certainly didn’t want to be a dope, so I took his message to heart and diligently memorized the advice he gave in his training (and possibly unwittingly laying a foundation for my future career as a Forex trader). Patience, good money management, an appropriate game plan were some of the points that seem to stick in my memory, but most importantly was the bit about following your rules; set a high when low loss limit for your gaming and stick to it (sound familiar?).
Well it wasn’t too long before Scott and I took a trip to Las Vegas with the intention of putting John Patrick’s training to practice. Scott headed for the blackjack tables, and I played the slot machines. Being duly diligent, I did everything that John said to do in his training, and, lo and behold, by 1 AM I had hit my high win limit and then I stopped playing for the night. As you can imagine I was quite a happy camper, thoroughly convinced that what I had learned was actually useful. I returned to my hotel room and went to bed. And that should have been the end of it, but Scott woke me at 3 AM having seen my winnings sitting on a table and offered to double down half of my pot on blackjack for me. Half asleep I said okay. It should come as no surprise that I woke up poorer than when I went to bed. I guess I should blame John Patrick as his lessons didn’t cover such a scenario. There is more to the story, and I will get to that later I promise. But let me initially make some points in the context of Forex trading.
For those who are new to Forex trading you going to get hit with multiple talking points regarding money management, risk, and so forth, and right up there at the top has to be patience. If you want to truly be successful as a trader, you really need to be patient. You need to be patient waiting for a strategy to play out after placing a trade; you need to be patient when a position goes against you, and you need to be patient when a position is deep in the money and should be allowed to run to its full profit potential. This is important; being patient will seriously help your bottom line here, as well as developing into a more calm and less frustrated trader.
In part two, I will identify some specific examples of how to be a patient trader and I’ll tell you what happened with Scott (and my jackpot). Until then have a great week in the room! See you later….