a trader’s guide

to Dominating the
Fear of Losing

Special Report #2
 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

I t can be a nightmare. You see your trading account starting to dwindle. You
can hear your spouse’s not so subtle comment on your reckless ambition to
make easy money. You decide that you need to produce an impressive win and
get her/him off your back. So, instead of buying your usual lot of 3 option con-
tracts, you decide to double up and buy six. You feel good about this trade and
you pull the trigger.

Before you can take a break and check the market, you hear the bad news on
the radio and you realize it could impact your trade. You feel a tingle of fear in
your spine as you pull up your trade on the computer. A lump forms in your
throat as you see prices approaching your stop. Not another loss. You decide to
give your position some room so you take off your stop. Just until lunch. You
know you shouldn’t do it but you do. If your spouse finds out you had another
loss, they would give you that look that says “loser”.

Making mistakes has different effects on individuals. When you’re a child, not
looking both ways can be life threatening. Putting coins into a wall outlet prob-
ably provided you with a close and personal view of a panic stricken mother.
Your first bad grades might have evoked parental body language that made you
feel small and worthless. We are so impressionable when we crawl through our
single digit years and many of the corrective measures used to keep us safe and
on the “right road” can have long lasting effects and unforeseen consequences.

Of course, every personality has a part to play in how we react to training and
correction but for most of us during the tender years, it can be painful and
much of that pain happens on a subconscious level. Many of us never get over
the subtle emotional effects of learning from mistakes. Neural pathways have
been formed and they inject an emotional component to our capacity to learn
from mistakes.

If we understand “the big picture”, making mistakes are just opportunities to

learn. If not understood in a mature way, mistakes can be felt as a personal fail-
ing. When we learn as children, emotions are much more in play than logic.
Depending on how adults handle the corrective process, children can learn
or they can be traumatized by rejection from the most important persons in

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

their lives-their parents or guardians. What makes it even more insidious is

that parents or guardians may have had no intention of creating fear or nega-
tive emotions but the child perceives it as such and these emotional learning
experiences can have a deep, long lasting effect-even through adulthood.

“Sometimes Normally, it isn’t until later in life that most of us learn that mis-
mistakes are takes are valuable signposts to corrective behavior. Hopefully, we
learn to accept our weaknesses and move on with new knowledge
inconsequential
and the ability to recognize the pattern of behavior for the next
but on occasion,
encounter with a similar situation. Sometimes mistakes are incon-
they can set in sequential but on occasion, they can set in motion a sequence of
motion a sequence events that can become ruinous. Learning to recognize and react
of events that can properly to certain situations helps us survive the next potential
become ruinous.” threat. Indeed, at its base, learning is all about survival.

It’s no different for traders. Making mistakes are to be learned from or fi-
nancial integrity of the trading account can be put in jeopardy. Your trading
account balance is your financial blood supply and if you lose too much of it,
you eventually can’t function as a trader. But to many, there is something even
darker than losing money; being wrong. If you have been successful enough
to amass an amount of money sufficient to trade, you probably are success
oriented. You play to win. You aren’t used to losing very often because you
expect or others expect you to win. You get positive reinforcement each time
you win and negative when you lose and you much prefer the positive. This
is normal.

Trading is not a natural undertaking and we have no basic instincts to guide

us. Like an infant, we must learn from scratch how to survive in a most com-
plex and Darwinian environment. Lack of knowledge and understanding of
the subject is a threat when trading in the cold unforgiving markets. But noth-
ing ventured, nothing to fear losing. But as soon as something of value can
be lost, the fear of losing looms over your shoulder and turns up the heat. For
some unknown reason, many would-be traders seem to take the approach of
“sink or swim” when starting to trade and jump in with little training or struc-
ture and very quickly lose some trades, and pain and fear quickly take over.

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

Most who trade without preparation are destined to sink. So, the first order of
business in avoiding the fear and pain of trading is education.

So let’s talk about some basics on how to avoid the fear that can be part of trading.

One of the basic laws of trading is to develop and stick to a trading system. That
means you have developed a trading system and have done enough paper trad-
ing to know what win-loss ratio to expect over a span of at least 100 trades. You
must use the same criteria and procedures on every trade. No exceptions. You
see, paper trading makes it safe because there is nothing to fear because there is
nothing to lose. This should tell you that trying to develop a system with the
pressures of not losing money is just too distracting. You just won’t sit there and
lose money in order to experiment to see what works. However,
“So, take this to many will plunge ahead like fools and this is backed by the fact that
the bank: if you 80-90% of novice traders fail mainly because they’re not prepared.
want to trade, you I guess that supports the Darwinian Theory; foolish behavior is not
compatible with survival. So, take this to the bank: if you want to
must prepare.”
trade, you must prepare. If you don’t, fear and pain await you.

Once you have developed a system and feel that you have developed the re-
petitive procedures to provide a mechanical framework within which you can
identify risk-reward, pick a high probability trade, chose stops and entry and
exit strategies, then you are ready to move up to the next level where you will
encounter the most challenging part of trading; facing down the twin terrors
of trading: losing money and being wrong.

Becoming a good loser

We have already introduced the concept of education and system develop-

ment but education on investing just gives you the tools to trade with, not the
temperament. Anybody can learn the mechanics of trading but few can learn
the proper attitude. Indeed, it is the attitude that separates successful traders
from the pack. Why is that? The answer is really quite simple: because losing
can be painful and can easily undermine logic and consistency.

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

Nobody likes to lose, particularly something of value- like money. Moreover,

only a dolt would continue to tolerate losing something of value over a long
and consistent period of time. But that’s exactly what traders do. You see, every
trader, no matter how smart or experienced, will lose and lose on a consistent
basis. It comes with the territory because all traders play in an arena where the
chaos factor reigns.

The chaos factor is the renegade variable that can’t be forecast with any sort
of certainty. It’s the old butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and the small air
current created by fragile little wings can evolve into a hurricane; little events
can become compounded to create an event that will become an “outlier”; an
event at the far edge of the bell curve; out beyond the second or third standard
deviation. These events don’t happen all the time, but they do happen.

The best that a trader can hope for is to identify high probability trades that
have at least a 75% or better chance of turning out as expected. However, that
still means that 25% of the time things won’t pan out. Through knowledge,
experience and good judgment, traders must learn how to gauge risk-reward
and whether to act or pull away. In fact, the key to becoming a successful
trader is not so much having big winning trades but having more winning
trades than losing ones. Trading is indeed a “numbers game”.

For the most part, learning how to accurately weigh risk and reward is mostly
a combination of academic knowledge and experience. However, because
the chaos variable of the unknown is always out there, no matter
“Notice I said how well prepared a trader is, even the best traders will experience
“experience” and losses. Notice I said “experience” and not “suffer” which is usually
not ‘suffer’...” the verb used with the word “losing”. Traders understand the dif-
ference because traders learn how to become “good losers”.

How do you learn to become a good loser in a society were losing equates with
being a loser? Well, it’s a two step process. First is education and logic. Once
that is acquired, comes the emotional-psychological conditioning that helps
bury the stigma of losing and create new neural networks that don’t pull the
strings on our subconscious memories and feelings.

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

Hanging you hat on the win-loss ratio

As we mentioned before, once you have developed a system that produces an

estimated win-loss ratio, you have the main logical factor to hang your hat on:
the win-loss probability of the system. Of course, the big question is how do
you establish a level of confidence in the ratio; how many tests do you need to
run to have a statistically significant number of trials? Most statisticians will
say that 100 trials should be enough, but the more trials the better the data.

The key point is that you need to have a reasonable level of confidence in your
system. If your system produces a win rate of 65% of the time then you know
that you should lose about 35% of the time over 100 trades. Your system is set
up to skew winning profit margins above losing margins and that’s the name
of the game. So, intellectually, you are expecting to lose 35% of the time. How
do you know that? Your system will only have validity if it is implemented the
exact same way every trade. If that is done, then you isolate errors introduced
by the trader and you can say with confidence that the system is where any
problems will be.

That sounds like a logical proposition and if you have faith in the system, then
trading becomes a more or less mechanical operation with the trader moving
the levers and nothing else. But what happens if the system doesn’t work well?
How can you just sit there and watch your valuable resources dwindle away?

The answer is again two fold: you reduce the angst by making the money you
lose not so valuable and you set limits to how much you lose before you put
on the brakes and step back.

Money Management

Another of the basic laws of trading is establishing clear money management

rules. In most of the trading world, money management is considered every
bit as important as having a viable trading system.

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

The first rule of money management for traders is to trade money

“Keep in mind you don’t need. If you don’t need it, it shouldn’t have that much
that the more emotional impact if you lose it. Before trading, you must sit down
money means to and make sure that your lifestyle and financial obligations depend
you, the harder it in no way on the funds you use for trading. Keep in mind that the
is to trade.” more money means to you, the harder it is to trade. To a trader,
money is just a means of measureing performance.

Trade limits

As a general rule, most traders feel that no more than 5% of the trading ac-
count capital should be risked on any one trade. For example, if you have a
trading account with a balance of $15,000, you would limit your risk on any
one trade to $750. After all, the basic premise of trading is to stay in the game
and let probability work in your favor. But to stay in the game, you need a
steady supply of trading capital. As a result, capital preservation is a funda-
mental factor. How do you do this important task?

What type of trading vehicle you trade will have a large bearing on how
much trading capital you will need. If you trade stocks, your capital require-
ment will be high. If you trade mini contracts, your trading capital require-
ments will be much lower. For example, if you want to trade 500 shares of
IBM, you would need about $ 55,000 at current prices or about $23,000
if trading on margin. However, if you trade IBM options, you would need
about $3000 to trade 5 out-of-the-money contracts (500 shares). Of course
with the $55,000 you own the actual stock but if you are a trader that really
doesn’t matter because traders only hold assets for a relatively short period
of time; minutes to months. So, most traders look for a way to trade assets
at the lowest cost. This leverage allows them to optimize the ROI (return on
investment) and provide more available capital for trading. Again, the more
investment capital you have to trade, the better the chances of probabilities
working in your favor.

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

Drawdown

Another important money management milestone is the maximum drawdown

limit. Typically, an account drawdown limit is set at about 35% of the account
balance and acts just like a circuit breaker. Once that limit has been hit, all
trading stops and it is time to analyze what is happening. Why 35%?

As you can see from the table on the next page, once the account reaches about
a 35% drawdown, the gains required just to catch up starts to go exponential.
At 50% drawdown you would need 100% gains on the total balance just to
get back to the original balance.

% Gain required to
% Drawdown
recoup loses
10 11.11
20 25.00
30 42.85
40 66.66
50 100
60 150
70 233
80 400
90 900
100 busted

So, if the account hits the drawdown limit, all trading comes to an immediate
stop. No exceptions. At this point, the trader asks the key questions:

• Is my system a bust? If so, how do I fix it?

• Am I not following procedures to the letter?
• What is my state of mind?
• How is my physical condition?
• What steps do I need to get back on track

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 

By following these simple rules of trade limits and drawdown limits, a trader
can keep his or her ammo dry. No doubt about it, probability can produce a
run of “bad luck” and give the impression that the system is not producing
the expected result. Maybe the situation just needs some time to step back and
take a pause. But the most common cause for trading anomalies is that the
trader has strayed from the discipline of the trading system. Having money
management procedures and rules act as the safety net and emergency stop
signal to allow the trader to stay in the game and make necessary changes be-
fore getting too deep in the hole.

If a trader establishes and follows the well tested rules as presented in this re-
port, there should be no fear of account blowout. The worst that will happen
is that trading stops until things are changed or the trader decides to move to
other forms of investments are made. Bottom-line, preservation of capital is
not only central to a traders strategy but also provides a safety valve to insure
that capital is preserved for other activities if trading has been found to no
longer be the most appropriate investment path.

Training the mind

Up until now, we have established a set of rules and intellectual guidelines to

help produce the intellectual framework and philosophy of trading. We talked
about the importance of developing a trading system which incorporates the
academic and intellectual techniques for executing trades. We talked about the
need to use trading capital that doesn’t have an impact if it is lost. Then, we
introduced the concept of money management as an integral part of staying in
the game and letting the probability of the win-loss ratio to work in the trader’s
favor. However there is one important subject we need to cover, as well.

Losing can become a trigger to negative emotions. Yes, trading capital is ex-
pendable and should have little impact if lost but losing in itself can set off
a chain of behavior that can be destructive to trading. Cracks can appear in
self-confidence, shame at squandering resources-no matter how worthless and
anger at just losing to the competition on the other side of the trade can start

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.

 a trader’s guide to Dominating the Fear of Losing 10

to alter the delicately balanced trading system. We start to sub-

“We start to consciously make slight alterations to procedures or in risk reward
subconsciously assessment. If not controlled, the deterioration can feed off itself
make slight and all trading discipline can be lost. In other words, emotions
alterations to take over the intellect and another trader bites the dust.
procedures or
To help guard against losing control, traders need a system of re-
in risk reward
programming the conditioned responses to losing that most
assessment.” competitive human beings have. For centuries, philosophers and
spiritualists have focused on the power of the mind to influence
outcome. Indeed, most top performers who depend on real time performance
for their success, take on a psychological trainer who helps them with the nec-
essary training to maintain psychological equilibrium and cope with times of
self doubt and lack of focus.

If you talk with most successful traders, they will tell you that a trader’s attitude
and state of mind is every bit as important as having a winning system. After
all, a system is only as good as its implementation. Ideally, we as traders should
model an emotionless robot and just facilitate input and output; however, the
things that make us human are hard to suppress and it a trader wants to be
successful (as opposed to self destructive), learning how to control emotions
and handle the stigma of losing is an essential skill. Because this sort of train-
ing is still a bit unorthodox, it is hard to find trained practioners familiar with
trading. The very fact that you are reading this article demonstrates that you
have found one of the few practioners familiar with trading and I encourage
you to make the effort because the training you receive is crucial to becoming
a successful trader…or anything you decide to undertake.

Special Report #2 © 2008 TheDisciplinedTrader.com. All Rights Reserved.