The Beliefs All Top Traders Share part 1:

When you’re trading in the markets, you’re trading your beliefs. Therefore, accessing, identifying, and understanding your beliefs is essential. The best traders use a wide variety of strategies—mean reversion, scalping, long-term trend following, short-term trading. They all can work under the right circumstances, for the right person. That said, there are a few common beliefs that virtually all top traders share, and they’re essential to understand. Your strategies can vary, but you should pay close attention to these core beliefs. You can’t have a clear strategy without clear beliefs. That leads into the next point: You must have a proven strategy that you believe in, and you must follow it to the letter.

Whether you’re Ray Dalio, Warren Buffett, or Paul Tudor Jones, if you want to make money, you need beliefs that inspire a strategy, and then you need to vow to follow that strategy completely. The strategies vary, but the commitment to having and following them doesn’t.

Pay close attention to the beliefs listed below:

1. Know your goals and objectives before you start trading, and before developing any strategy. By knowing what outcome you’re seeking beforehand, your strategy will take about 80 percent less time to create. When you don’t have an objective or goal, you tend to tread water, because you can’t make a plan without an endpoint. Set your objective, then make a plan to get there. You need to take a bit of extra time beforehand to save 80 percent of your time later and guarantee success. The clearer your objectives, the easier the development process, and the easier the execution.

• Don’t trade at all on days in which there are no low-risk trades available. It’s common to think you have to trade every day, but that leads to big losses on days when you shouldn’t have traded at all.

• Good trading is boring. The way to succeed in trading is to overcome all of your psychological weaknesses as a human. Those weaknesses can make life fun, but trading is about being rational, even robotic.

On the next post we dive deeper into the fact WHY it is so important that trading needs to be boring. It is KEY to being successful in the markets, so stay tuned!

Until next time, Laurens Bensdorp, Trading Mastery School