Don’t Overreact to Bad Days

It can help to zoom out and look at your progress on a longer timescale.

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Even if you’re making the right decisions, you can still have bad days.

That applies not just to trading, but also to any sort of project or goal you might be working on. It’s part of life in general.

So it’s important to stay consistent and not let a single bad outcome derail you.

Yes, that can be difficult psychologically. We tend to be risk-averse and overreact to negative outcomes.

But it can help to zoom out and look at your progress on a longer timescale.

At the same time, though, you can’t use that as an excuse to avoid measuring progress and thinking critically about it.

Every time there’s a bad outcome, you have to ask whether there’s anything you can learn from it to carry into the future.

Sometimes there’s a flaw in reasoning.

Other times there’s a flaw in assumptions.

Perhaps you didn’t have all the key information to begin with and you should have done better due diligence.

Or perhaps some information revealed itself or changed after you made the decision but you were too slow to react.

It’s not worth beating yourself up over mistakes, unless they’re mistakes you’re repeating over again.

One-and-done mistakes won’t keep you from making progress in the long-term, but repeated mistakes will.

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