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Dont take the market home with you

аIf you day trade for a living, then you must take great care to leave the market when you leave the office. Even if you are only a part-time trader and do not have a full-time market-related job, you must also avoid spending too much time or thought on the markets. When things go well, you may allow the markets to have too much influence in fulfilling other areas of your life. This is not advisable, since it will cause you to avoid or delay solving other problems.

Trading must be considered a means to an end. It should not become a way of life, and it should not dictate your every move. Make certain you take vacations. Take time each year to get away from it all. By being too close to the situation, you may not see it for what it really is.

Enjoy the fruits of your labor - spend some profits, save some profits. Make it a regular practice to remove profits from the market. Spend some of them and save some of them. You must directly experience the positive feelings of using profits to acquire some of the things you have always wanted to buy. I suggest you do this regularly, perhaps monthly. You will not be motivated to make profits if you do not experience firsthand the enjoyment that can come from spending money.

Avoid overconfidence - it could be your greatest enemy. Day trading does not always move in a positive direction. Just as you should not allow your losing day to bring you down, you must not allow the winning day to get you up too high. If you are on either of these emotional extremes, your judgment can be impaired and you will not be rational enough to trade effectively. You will be either too brave or too meek. The best course is to even out the peaks and valleys. Each loss should be a negative experience, but not a totally destructive defeat. Similarly, each profit should be taken in stride.

Your next goal should always be in sight. Once you have attained an objective, make certain that your next challenge is set. A well-known commodity trader made several million dollars in the market one year. He lost it and almost went bankrupt the next year. I asked him how this could have happened. "Simple," he replied. "When you climb a mountain and you are sitting on the top of the world, it gets lonely. There's no place left to go but down." If, however, you have another mountain to climb once you get to the top, you will not be tempted to go down in order to have a new challenge.