Trading – especially day trading is very stressful. Not all can do day trading.

You can still enjoy it. Day trading should be looked at as a marathon and not like sprint. A single bad trade should not make you change your trading styles. Each day trader is different. In a day every trade is also different. Things are constantly changing every moment. And the market trends keeps changing based on this. This does not mean that you have to be under stress to manage these changes and keep afloat. Everything is in your hands. You can manage stress. It is simple.

First, you should learn to take profits and losses in its stride. Trading has a 50:50 chance of winning and losing. 

Second, have a good trading system. This will reduce the risk and make it easier to handle the changes and their effect on your trades.

Third, make a schedule, it is not necessary that you have to always keep trading to from the moment the markets open till they close. Your trading schedule will help you regain control over your trading activities.

Fourth, stay focussed and set limits. Traders generally get carried away by minor details and forget their main goals. Like any business set a limit for every month. Say earning Rs.5000 or Rs.10000 as the limit for a month. This reduces the amount of stress to a large extent. When a trade goes against you don’t sit and cry over it. Analyse it why it went wrong, did you overlook you trading plan, the limits set by you, etc. Find out the causes. This will build your confidence. You can correct yourself and avoid such mistakes. Never rely more on TVs, News and market reporters. Everybody is at the same level like you. Nobody has better ideas or strategies to beat the market. If that was the case then they would not be here on the TV, news or other media talking to you and giving their outlook on the markets. They will trading to make money. No one can predict the market. Market movements are based on crowd behaviour. So you do your homework, without hardwork nothing works. Look at trading as any other business, with capital, profit targets, time scale to achieve this target, etc. By doing this you will enjoy day trading and forget about stress. One last point I would like to say here is – Stop Loss. Don’t forget about this. It is the only thing that will help you survive and continue with day trading as well as preserve your capital.

Last week I came across this article. It opened up my eyes towards living a stress free life.

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A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.  Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to hot coffee.  

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups and were eyeing each other's cups. 

Now if life is coffee, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, but the quality of Life doesn't change. Some times, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee in it."

Don't let the cups drive you... Enjoy the coffee instead. Have a good trading day “