Habit - 6 - Long-term

Stay long-term oriented. Don't adjust your approach based solely on short-term performance. Our entire society emphasizes instant gratification. We are consuming are long-term capital. Eventually, this will lead to a decline in our standard of living over what it could have been with more attention to the future.

Most traders have such an ego investment in their trading that they cannot handle losses. Several losses in a row are devastating. This causes them to evaluate trading methods and systems based on very-short-term performance. Statisticians tell us that there is no statistical reliability to a test unless you have 30 events to measure. Short of a reasonable number of events, the outcome is wholly dependent on luck. As we saw in the risk of ruin discussion above, strings of losses are as certain as government inefficiency. Thus, the trader who chucks his system after four losses in a row is doomed to spend his trading career changing from one system to another. Don't start trading a system based on only a few trades, and don't lose confidence in one after only a few losses. Evaluate your performance based on many trades and multi-year results.