TPS E18: Why Wishing, Hoping and Praying will blow your trading account?

Remember earlier we talked about how important it is to be an active winner and loser. In other words, you must act to take profits and act to get out of losing trades. You cannot be passive with the market, and that’s exactly what wishing, hoping, and praying does. It makes us passive.

In general, there is nothing wrong with wishing, hoping, and praying. We all hope and wish certain things will happen in our lives and that’s fine.

But there is no room for it in trading. The problem comes when we wish, hope, and pray that the market will do what we want it to. This puts us in a passive relationship with the market. Thus, we don’t become an active winner and loser. When you wish, hope, and pray that the market will do a certain thing or move in a certain direction, you are shifting the responsibility to the markets.

But as you already know, the responsibility should not be with the market, but within ourselves. In other words, only we are responsible for the results we receive. Hoping, wishing, and praying that the market will do what we want is very harmful. Many times it paralyzes us and prevents us from doing what’s in our best interest. This happens because what the market is doing doesn’t agree with what we want it to do. And many times our wishing, hoping, and praying causes us to be locked into our opinion of the market.

The one thing you must remember is that our opinion isn’t necessarily right about the market. To make it even more difficult, our opinion could be right, but we just might be too early. But that’s O.K. You don’t have to be right all the time to be successful. You just can’t get so locked into an opinion that you are wishing and hoping the market moves a certain direction. The market will only move in whatever direction the buy and sell orders cause it to move. Unfortunately, your wishing and hoping will have no bearing on which direction the market moves.

If you find yourself wishing, hoping, and praying the market will do something, this is an excellent indication that you do not have a good grasp of the current situation, and it’s definitely time to exit the position and re-evaluate.

It’s very easy to get in the habit of wishing, hoping, and praying (especially for newer traders), but as you can see, it’s a big mistake. Obviously, you’ll want to avoid it at all costs because it will never be acting in your own best interest, and it will always be difficult to succeed in that passive relationship.

The one thing that makes all of this a little confusing is that intuition (that little voice in your head that tells you what to do) feels very much like wishing, hoping, and praying. In The Disciplined Trader, Mark Douglas explains it very clearly: “However, there is another less obvious problem with avoidance, especially with respect to wishing and hoping. A true intuitive impulse – a deeper level of knowledge and wisdom that will indicate the next most appropriate step to take – that will always be in our best interest feels very much like wishing and hoping. In other words, it is very difficult to distinguish between the two, making it very easy to mix them up, which is one of the reasons why we find it so difficult to trust our intuition. The way you can know for sure that you are getting a true intuitive impulse is to clear out of your mental environment anything that would cause you to wish and hope that something will happen instead of confronting the issue head on to find out what needs to be done. You can wish and hope that the market will come back, or you can cut your loss and make yourself ready to take the next opportunity requires that you change anything in your mental environment that would cause you to avoid confrontation and consequently wish and hope. The less cause you have for wishing and hoping that something will happen, the more you will know that when you get that certain feeling, it is a true intuitive impulse, and the more confidence you will have to follow it. Intuition will always guide you in the most appropriate way to fulfill your needs.”

“You can wish and hope that the market will come back, or you can cut your loss and make yourself ready to take the next opportunity.”