The Importance of Non-Greediness

If you want to make more money trading - stop being greedy in the market. Be greedy about your goals, ambitions, dreams, but when you're online in the market - be flexible and don't try to take more than the market can give you. If you do that you will burn because the market is not your servant and it doesn't care about what you want.

Profit is profit - it doesn't matter if you made 30 or 10 pips today - what matters is that you keep profiting consistently. And how do you achieve that?

Because I am making money in the FX market consistently, I can say that the only real way to achieve consistent profitability is knowledge about the market. You need to trade the professional side of the market with a professional strategy that is based on correct beliefs and real market knowledge. You can't develop a professional strategy if you just watched some random lessons on YouTube.

I trade without stop loss. Most traders would probably hiccup on this thought, because they're obsessed with reward/risk ratios and % returns. And yes you should be obsessed with that if you don't have a clue about how the market actually works.

In my case I only take high probability trades where, based on my professional understanding, I know where the price is going with almost 100% certainty. What I don't know is when it will go there because I'm not a wizard and the chart can't tell me that. Trading without stop loss forced me to stop being greedy because being greedy means expecting that the price will move further than what the chart is telling me. So if I'm greedy in a trade without stop loss it would mean a disaster to me. So when you combine market knowledge with ability to walk your talk, the greed issue automatically fades away. Why would you need a stop loss if you honestly know where the price is going? And why would you expect more if you trust your analysis and you know that the market won't give you more?

Most retail traders are lead to believe that the path to trading success is 90% psychology and 10% knowledge. It's what most education companies will tell you. And they tell you that for the same reason the Catholic church will tell you that you're a sinner. They want to keep you in the dark so that you'd never even try to find out the true reason why you're consistently on the losing side in the markets.

You can try to stop your greediness as much as you want but you can't because every single human on planet earth has the quality of greed and it's given for a reason. It's just part of our internal feedback mechanism. You have activated your greed because you don't know how the market works and you expect it to make you rich anyway. So greed is just a result - a feedback based on your thoughts and beliefs. So you can't deactivate your greed by focusing on your psychology. You can only do that by focusing on gaining the professional understanding about how the market works and on becoming a better trader.

Use greed as your feedback mechanism. If you feel greed while trading then you are not a good trader yet. And you're not making as much money as you could. So stop blaming yourself and stop reading books about trading psychology because they won't help you at all. In church they ask you to do the same thing: to blame yourself and to read Bible but does it actually help with your spiritual development?

The truth about trading success is the opposite - it's 90% knowledge and 10% psychology. To climb out from the darkness you need to tell yourself that your current beliefs about the market are worthless because they're the exact reason you ended up in this dark hole. You also need to tell yourself that you need to find a successful trader who will teach you how to trade with a true professional understanding. That person might be your neighbour, or he might live on the other side of the planet - but if your goals mean anything to you, you will get to that place and you will pay any price to learn from him. That's what I did myself (although my trip was a bit shorter) and I'm eternally grateful to my teacher.

Remember: greed = loss. Strive to be calm, poised and balanced while trading. But you can't do that with meditation alone, because trading is not meditation. You do need knowledge to remain calm, poised and balanced while trading. Treat trading as a serious business and you will succeed.