As a full time or part time trader, trading discipline is one of the main reasons you will either fail or succeed at this game.

It really comes down to your knowledge and skills but how you handle yourself in the best conditions and worst conditions. In all my years as a trader I have traded in many market environments. I have traded through the dot com boom and bust, and also the latest financial crisis in which the market crashed very badly and left many investors with large losses.

Trading discipline is not about making huge amounts of money. Any monkey can sit behind a keyboard and make money on the futures and global equities market. The real secret to trading is having a unique discipline that you can apply to your trading to ensure minimum risk and maximum gain. It is not how you react in the best of times, when you are making good profits. It is how you react when things go against you or you start losing money.

Do you sit there and take the hit? In your mind are you thinking to yourself 'dont worry it will come back' 'it will recover'? or do you just look away from the screen blindly and not even admit you are taking a major loss.

Major losses will come to those that do not use proper money management and throw simple trading discipline rules right out the window. Without proper trading discipline you are destined to fail from day one. You are probably thinking back to a bad trade you had recently and realise exactly what I am talking about.

In a recent survey conducted, 200 traders were asked why they suffered their most recent major loss.

Here were the three most common answers.

1) Lack of trading discipline I gave back all my profits to the market thinking I knew best.
2) Did not follow my trading plan and was unable to pull the trigger at the right time.
3) Was unable to convince myself I was wrong, I hate being wrong and thought I was right.

As you can see these three mistakes are quite common for a trader who lacks trading discipline.

People often tell us that if we want to make money on the stock market you just have to 'buy low' and then 'sell high' but there is much more to trading that this. What about the stuff left out in the middle. That is, having a good trading plan, being disciplined, and working in a stop loss strategies in case the market goes against you?. These are the most important elements to trading, if you want to survive and be in this game for the long haul.

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