Trading on Target: How to Cultivate a Winner's State of Mind

MR. PERFECTION

Roy is a brilliant man with an enormous capacity to achieve success as a professional trader and in his personal life. The problem is that he actually achieves and produces very little because he is obsessed with doing everything perfectly and in having everything perfect. For that reason, Roy has spent much of the past 25 years working on creating the perfect trading system. Periodically, he allows himself to feel that his system is ready to trade and once again he trades in real time. At first, his system will perform … you guessed it … perfectly and he will make a killing in the market for at least a month and possibly more. At this point, he will call me and wax poetic about the perfection of his system. But shortly thereafter, his system will begin to generate some losses as well, and as soon as that happens, Roy’s trading goes into a steep decline. Within a brief time, he will have given back everything he made in the markets and sometimes a bit more.

Once this cycle ends, Roy will begin all over again to fiddle with his system until it is perfect and will create only profits and no losses.

And what about Roy’s perfect life? Well, Roy is not married because he has never found the perfect woman. He has had many girlfriends, but he falls out of love with each one as soon as he discovers her imperfections. He does not own a house because he could never settle on one—there was always a problem with each home in which he has lived. In fact, he has moved literally ...