Patience & Discipline: Key in Trading Success

The ultimate mysteries are opened only to those who have immense patience.

Osho

And

Once you have commitment, you need the discipline and hard work to get you there.

Haile Gebrselassie

• Discipline is a bridge between your goals and your achievements.
• Patience isn’t the ability of someone to wait, rather it is an extraordinary quality of someone to keep the best attitude while waiting.
• Discipline means to train yourself to follow rules or a certain code of behavior to taste the fruit of success.

“Patience is a virtue” according to an ancient adage. It is something beyond the truth. Patience helps us realize our goals, make us proactive and less reactive, and lead us to mental strength where we aren’t prone to make rash, impulsive, and bad decisions. Those who sit a spell without reacting when encountering uncertainty and negative situations always achieve big. The reason is, they get back to their right frame of mind before making any decisions. Others who don’t have patience are prone to lose their rational sense and make mistakes meet failures in life and profession. That is the power of patience. 

Discipline is also a virtue. Discipline is a bridge between your goals and your achievements. If you cannot do what your goals demand you to do, you cannot achieve your goals. Discipline makes you do even those things you don’t want to do but still you do to achieve success. That means discipline is a crucial strategy to be a top professional. Moreover, discipline is something that has refining powers to turn your talent into your ability. Thus, you cannot underestimate the power of discipline in every field of life including your professional journey. 

What are patience and discipline? 

You can find various definitions of patience. Patience isn’t the ability of someone to wait, rather it is an extraordinary quality of someone to keep the best attitude while waiting. No matter how you define patience, it is an extraordinary quality that can take you to excellence in every sphere of life. Bill Gates says that patience is a key element of success and Kao Yang says that patience is the road to wisdom. 

Discipline means to train yourself to follow rules or a certain code of behavior to taste the fruit of success. If you remain disciplined in any sort of activity, irrespective of its difficulties and complications, you eventually achieve a favorable outcome. However, you need to behave in a very controlled manner and follow particular rules, regulations, and standards. 

Patience and discipline in trading

Patience and discipline combine to make a force that can face all sorts of trials and tribulations. Trading endeavor isn’t an exception. It requires you to be patient and disciplined. In fact, two things define your trading success, your patience, and discipline during your trading journey. 

Understanding the power of discipline and patience in trading completely changes the trajectory of your trading performance. They make you a perfect and flawless trader to achieve your goals faster. Patience and discipline are two precious pearls that all successful traders never let go of. All the successful traders all across the globe always emphasize patience and discipline. What does that suggest? That suggests no other profession requires more wisdom, patience, and discipline than the trading profession. Trading is a profession where competitions are always at their peak and you are up against the sharpest minds in the world. There are traders who are always ready to pounce on a small mistake you make. Therefore, you always need to have patience and discipline in trading. 

Although the cheetah is the fastest animal in the world and can catch any animal on the plains, it will wait until it is absolutely sure it can catch its prey. It may hide in the bush for a week, waiting for just the right moment. It will wait for a baby antelope, and not just any baby antelope, but preferably one that is also sick or lame; only then, when there is no chance it can lose its prey, does it attack. That, to me, is the epitome of professional trading

Mark Weinstein

Why do you need to exercise discipline and patience in trading? 

Who are the most successful traders in the world? The obvious answer is those who are consistently making a profit over a long period of time. What made them so successful? It’s their most important traits, discipline, and patience. The ability to make profits month in month out demands the highest level of patience and discipline. If you have a well-tried and tested trading strategy, even then you cannot make profits if you don’t have patience and discipline with you. If you don’t have the patience and discipline to follow the rules of the best trading strategies, you cannot achieve success. That is why you need to exercise discipline and patience in trading. 

How do patience and discipline work in trading? 

Patience and discipline in trading are the biggest rewarding virtues. Your trading strategy, diligence, and research inform you when to enter and exit trades. But, letting the price touch the boundaries set by your trading strategy takes some time. There you need to be patient and disciplined. Therefore, you need to be patient and disciplined in the following key moments. 

Entry point

When waiting for the price to reach your entry point level, entering a trade in a rush proves costly. You need to be patient here and also practice discipline in trading. Don’t violate the rules set by your trading strategy. Just follow the predetermined rules and be patient until the price reaches your entry point level. That is what patience and discipline trading requires. 

Searching for a suitable trade

The market is full of trading opportunities and it is never difficult to find tradable opportunities. However, it is important to hunt those opportunities that are according to your trading strategy. Patience trading requires you to wait for good entry points while making sure that you have defined your exit along with stop-loss level. Once you enter a trade according to your trading strategy, discipline trading requires you to follow all the protocols of your strategy and keep your emotions at bay. 

Waiting for exits to take profit

Once you enter a trade according to your trading strategy, the time for patience and discipline in trading comes. Now, you need a lot of patience to give your position enough time to develop. Most of the time it happens that traders exit their position because of fear of loss. They don’t even wait with patience when their well-thought-out plan is in place. Remember that losses are also part of the game. You cannot always win. Trust in your trading strategy, trading plan, patience, and discipline are crucial. All successful traders have absolute faith in their trading strategy. Even if it incurs losses, they collect all the relevant information to analyze the situation. They discover what was right and what went wrong. Successful traders’ patience and discipline in trading eventually leads them to improvements and finally to make profits month in month out.

When you encounter a situation where the price of your stock barely moves despite being patient and disciplined, re-analyze your analysis of the trade. See what has changed and decided accordingly. If the stock doesn’t fulfill the criteria, sell your position immediately. If a stock meets all your requirements, hold your position patiently because the stock will reach the target position soon. The reward for your patience and discipline in trading will be so sweet. It happens and it will continue to happen. That is what trading is and that is what patience and discipline in trading all about. All the trading situations are teachers that teach you that discipline and patience in trading are difficult but reward big and reward sweetly. 

When you encounter various trials, big or small, be full of joy. They’re opportunities to learn patience.

Scott Curran

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