No matter how closely you watch the markets, some trades are going to pass you by.
Maybe you weren’t watching the right stock at the right time… Or maybe you were too busy keeping on top of your open trades.
Rather than kicking yourself over missed opportunities, you have to let them go. You can’t win every trade. And you can’t take part in every great trade.
There’s not enough time to scrutinize every opportunity out there. Even if you could, you might not have enough money for every trade.
From novice investors to experienced hedge fund managers, we all have a finite amount of capital. Our job is to put it to its best use.
That’s why you need to brush off missed chances. Instead, concentrate on finding your next winner…
You Can’t Catch Every Move
We’ve all had plenty of trades that we’ve missed. And that can mess with some people’s heads: If only I’d bought Bitcoin when it was trading for a few hundred dollars… or bought into Nvidia right before it took off!
Watching the tickers can be a constant reminder about that big “mistake.” And that stops you from being able to move on. But fretting over a missed opportunity is simply a waste of your time.
The real mistake is thinking you can trade every market and catch every move. Understanding this separates professional fund managers from everyone else.
For every Bitcoin and Nvidia, there are hundreds (if not thousands) of other stocks that flare out as quickly as they rise.
Looking for the next “big one” is a low-probability game.
The trick is to focus on the next trade. Because there’s always a new trade not far away…
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Focus on the Next Trade
Even someone like me – who has been around the markets 40+ years and successfully run an multimillion hedge fund – misses trades sometimes.
And we’ve already seen that this year… Have I missed any trades? You bet!
Gold recently burst through the $3,000 mark for the first time. Plus there’s been the strong outperformance of European stocks over U.S. stocks this year. (Germany has outperformed the U.S. by around 20%.)
I even wrote about the imbalance between U.S. and European stocks in my predictions right back at the start of the year. Yet I still managed to miss both trades…
But that’s the point… Across my trading services, my subscribers are still enjoying a strong start to the year.
The S&P Trader might end up our strongest year ever if we maintain our momentum. And at The Opportunistic Trader, we’ve regularly banked double- and triple-digit gains. Even at One Ticker Trader, we’ve maintained a 100% win rate as of this writing.
We don’t need to take part in every trade. We just need to keep trading the opportunities we see. In the end, we’ll likely enjoy better profits than we would have otherwise.
Of course, it would have been great to bank these extra gains on gold and European stocks too. But the best strategy is to put those missed opportunities behind me and worry about my next trade. I don’t gain anything from lingering.
The same will be true for you too. There’s no point ruminating endlessly or wondering about the “what ifs.”
Instead, you need to ruthlessly consign any missed chance to the dustbin of your trading history. And ready yourself for your next trade as soon as you can.
That’s the best way to succeed as a trader in the long term.
Regards,
Larry Benedict
Editor, Trading With Larry Benedict