Successful Trading – Establish Your Risk LevelWritten by Chuck Cox
Before you embark upon a journey of trading stocks or futures, and before you make any trades, you MUST determine and establish your risk level. Traders that fail to do this are usually doomed from start. The fact is that most trading accounts that go bust are because of failure to determine at what point trader will cut their losses and move on to next trade. Rookie traders are particularly prone to do this. They hang on to losing positions hoping that they will turn around – only to watch price drop even further. Too much thought and effort are expended on buying decision instead of selling decision. The sad truth is that it’s selling decision that will determine your fate as a successful trader. And successful trading is dependent on how long and how well you can protect your account against loss until big profit comes your way. Setting a risk level for your account and for your trades will provide such protection.If you’re like everyone else, you’ve got an online trading account and you’re free to move in and out of positions without input or interruption of a broker. If you’re not doing this, we recommend that you do. So when you buy a position, have you determined where you would to sell it if price would fall? Many traders only think about price going up – they never think about what they’ll do if it goes down. You MUST determine this limit BEFORE placing a trade.
| | Building Wealth: It's An Inside Job – Part 1Written by Chuck Cox
Whenever we read about building wealth or even attend a seminar for that purpose, we usually begin by assessing our present financial status. We’re asked to calculate our assets and liabilities followed by a determination of where we’d like to be in a certain period of time. Being armed with this data along with assessing our present earning and saving power, we then set out to structure our financial goals. Although we try to be realistic, we still want to stretch ourselves a little bit – after all, that’s one of purposes of setting goals, isn’t it? To achieve more than we normally would if we didn’t have goals in first place. And also, goals are supposed to give us direction.So when actually seeking out these new financial goals, many of us fall dreadfully short. What happened? Did we not work hard enough or just plan poorly? Maybe, but it’s probably much deeper than that. One tactic that many goal-setting gurus use to get more mileage out of setting goals is to find out WHY we want a certain goal. This certainly helps us get more leverage on achieving our goal, but to many people money is much more complicated than that. Money represents our upbringing and our culture. To some of us, money represents bad memories of parents arguing or watching our families suffer for lack of it, while others may view money as only a tool and seem to have no problem accumulating it in their bank accounts. These financial memories have created mental roadblocks for many of us when it comes to making money. Thus, if we want to build wealth, we have to go one step further and determine our personal level of prosperity consciousness. If we’re curious about our present level of prosperity consciousness, we need only take a critical look at our own lives. Our homes, our jobs, our bank accounts will all quickly tell us where we are in terms of prosperity - like it or not - our surroundings are simply results of our thoughts and actions. Our level of satisfaction can be linked to distance between where we are and where we want to be. However, two people with identical distances will almost always have different levels of satisfaction, and these satisfaction levels are linked to their personal levels of prosperity consciousness. Here’s something to ponder. What if everyone in world were to throw all their riches into one big pile and then split all that wealth equally among everyone in world? In a few years, who would then emerge as being wealthy and poor? Most people feel that very little would change – that same people would most likely become wealthy and poor again. This assessment speaks volumes about prosperity consciousness. So what if we’re unhappy with our present level of prosperity consciousness, how do we change it? The answer is that we have to start getting comfortable with more prosperity coming into our lives. There are some simple things that we can start doing today which will dramatically increase our levels of prosperity over time. Bear in mind that these actions are not instantaneous – they’ll need some time to yield results. 1) Use Written Affirmations – It sounds elementary, but this little trick actually works. Simply write down your affirmation 20 times each morning and each evening. We should choose an affirmation that suits our particular situation and prosperity level. To find out where to begin, start with this one: “I deserve to be wealthy”. Does it make you feel uncomfortable when you write it down? If so, that’s a sign that you probably need to use that one or something similar. You could also try this one: “I am bringing more and more wealth into my life each day.” Play around with words and see how they make you feel. If you’re too outrageous, your subconscious will reject idea, so you want something that makes you feel slightly anxious or uncomfortable. Continue using your affirmation for 30 days and then start using a different affirmation. The next affirmation should be a natural building block on previous one. The key to affirmations is to be persistent and not give up on them because they seem ineffective, repetitive, and boring. The fact is that you NEED to be doing them when they become repetitive and boring. Remember that you’re trying to undo years of mental programming and repetition is required.
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