The Thin Line Between Success and Failure

In Life there seems to be a thin line between Love and Hate. Anyone who has been in a relationship can testify to this fact. One minute you and your girl are kissing, cuddling and pledging your undying love for each other. The next minute she is screaming at you, slapping you across the face, and saying how much she hates you.

As Winthrop says to Valentine in the movie Trading Places "In the Pits you make No Friends and Take No Prisoners. One minute your Up half a Million in soybeans, the Next they are repossessing your Bentley and your Kids aren't Going to College".

In Trading there is a very thin between Success and Failure. The reason for this is because a Trader can choose to take a position size that is too large just one time, and this will undo months and even years of good decisions.

This is similar to the saying that reputations can take a life time to build and only minutes to destroy. Lets say you did everything right in your life, then one Sunday you are at church and decide to drop your pants in front of the congregation and put your testicles on the shoulder of some nice old lady. One bad decision like this and everything good you have done will be long forgotten. You will forever be seen differently by everyone due this extreme act of perversion.

When Traders are Trading at home by themselves they have nothing but their own rules and discipline as their safety net. All it takes is one time not following these rules to lose everything you have worked so hard for. At Professional Trading Firms the Risk Manager will make sure you don't lose too much money, and will cut off your trading before you lose too much of your allotted equity. At Home Traders Do Not have anyone else to prevent us from Self Destruction.

The thin line between Success and Failure comes down to what you choose to focus on. The people who fail focus on how much money they can make, and how fast. The Traders who succeed focus on Managing Risks, and Following their plan.

The Profits, Winnings and Money Making will care of themselves if you focus on just managing the Risks in Trading. This approach seems backwards to people who have not developed the right Trading Psychology. They feel that if they don't primarily focus on Making Money they will miss it. This is exactly why most Traders lose their money.

The Successful Traders always welcome more and more idiots to the Game who are drawn by the lure of Big, Fast, and Easy Money.


In the End all we can do is take responsibility for ourselves and our own actions. In Trading we are all Lone Wolves and we do not really have any "friends" in the traditional sense of the word.