Everyone who trades ends up learning something about the markets; very few people who trade ever learn the attitudes that are absolutely essential to becoming a consistent winner.

Just as people can learn to perfect the proper technique for swinging a golf club or tennis racket, their consistency, or lack of it, will without a doubt come from their attitude.

Trading is inherently risky. To my knowledge, no trade has a guaranteed outcome; therefore, the possibility of being wrong and losing money is always present.

Any trader is taking a risk when you put on a trade, but that doesn’t mean that you are correspondingly accepting that risk. In other words, all trades are risky because the outcomes are probable—not guaranteed.

The best traders not only take the risk, they have also learned to accept and embrace that risk.

The risks inherent in trading do not cause the best traders to lose their discipline, focus, or sense of confidence.

Learning to accept the risk is a trading skill—the most important skill you can learn.

95% of the trading errors you are likely to make—causing the money to just evaporate before your eyes—will stem from your attitudes about being wrong, losing money, missing out, and leaving money on the table. What I call the four primary trading fears.

When it comes to trading, your fears will act against you in such a way that you will cause the very thing you are afraid of to actually happen.

If you’re afraid of being wrong, your fear will act upon your perception of market information in a way that will cause you to do something that ends up making you wrong.

Many of the thinking patterns that adversely affect our trading are a function of the natural ways in which we were brought up to think and see the world.

If we aren’t aware of, or don’t understand, how our beliefs and attitudes affect our perception of market information, it will seem as if it is the market’s behavior that is causing the lack of consistency.

No matter how much you learn about the market’s behaviour, no matter how brilliant an analyst you become, you will never learn enough to anticipate every possible way that the market can make you wrong or cause you to lose money.

The hard, cold reality of trading is that every trade has an uncertain outcome. Unless you learn to completely accept the possibility of an uncertain outcome, you will try either consciously or unconsciously to avoid any possibility you define as painful.