ForexSpirit

I bit the bullet earlier this week. On Tuesday I closed out one of my Q3 trades for a loss and Wednesday saw me closing out the other Q3 entry.

These are my biggest loses for the year so far. I just didn’t feel comfortable holding them any longer. The medium term strength of the US dollar is pretty murky right now. The slew of economic data coming out tomorrow is hoped by most people to provide a little bit more clarity to the current situation.

One of those crazy but stubborn trading thoughts swirls around my mind when I close out trades in the red, such as the two this week. I think to myself that I seem to have a knack for closing out my losing trades when price is bottoming out. It’s certainly happened a few times where I seem to have prophetically picked the absolute bottom of the correction. I always have to counter such thinking with the knowledge that it doesn’t happen like that all the time. It’s funny how the mind can be so selective in its memories at times like this and so it feels that I’m always closing out losing trades at the worst possible time.

If I let that sort of thinking influence me too much, then I’d always be talking myself out of closing losing trades. If I was debating whether to close out a losing trade and made the arguement that price always went up after I closed out then I would be just setting myself up for scenarios when the price continues to tank and I end up regretting not having taken my loss when I should have.

I don’t like taking loses. I don’t think anybody does. That’s one of the reasons I like to keep my number of losses to a minimum. A loss takes more out of you emotionally and mentally then you receive positively from a win. This is why it is so difficult to trade a system that has more losers than winners. While the system might have a positive monetary expectancy, you also have to take into account the expectancy on your emotions and mental state.