Follow Your Discipline
Discipline can’t be taught in a seminar or found in expensive trading software. Traders spend thousands of dollars trying to compensate for their lack of self-control but few realize that a long look in the mirror accomplishes the same task at a much cheaper price!

Lose the Crowd
Long-term profitability requires positioning ahead of or behind the crowd, but never in the crowd because that’s where predatory strategies target. Stay away from stock boards and chat rooms. This is serious business and everyone in those places has an ulterior motive.

Don’t Break Your Rules
You create trading rules to get you out of trouble when positions go badly. If you don’t allow them to do their job, you’ve lost your discipline and opened the door to even greater losses.

Avoid Market Gurus
It’s your money at stake, not theirs. Keep in mind that they're probably talking up their positions, hoping the excited chatter will increase their profits, not yours.

Listen to Your Intuition
Trading uses the mathematical and artistic sides of your brain so you need to cultivate both to succeed in the long run. Once you're comfortable with math, you can enhance results with meditation, a few yoga postures or a quiet walk in the park.

Get Your Personal Life in Order
Whatever is wrong in your life will eventually carry over into your trading performance. This is especially dangerous if you haven’t made peace with money, wealth and the magnetic polarity of abundance and scarcity.

Pay Attention to Early Warning Signs
Big losses rarely occur without multiple technical warnings. Traders routinely ignore those signals and allow hope to replace thoughtful discipline, setting themselves up for pain.

Don’t Confuse Execution With Opportunity
Traders make up for insufficient skills with expensive software, prepackaged with all sorts of proprietary buy and sell signals. These tools interfere with valuable experience because you think the software is smarter than you are.

Ditch the Paycheck Mentality
We’re taught to grind through the work week and then pick up our paychecks. This pay-for-effort reward mentality conflicts with the natural flow of trading wins and losses during the course of a year. In fact, statistics indicate that most annual profits are booked on just a handful of days the market is open for business.

Embrace Simplicity
Focus on price action, understanding that everything else is secondary. Go ahead and build complex technical indicators but keep in mind their primary function is to confirm or refute what your trained eye already sees.

Make Peace With Losses
Trading is one of the few professions where losing money every day is a natural path to success. Every trading loss comes with an important market lesson if you’re open to the message.