Literally, the whole trading styles can be divided in 2 groups, the attack ones, and the defense ones.
Like in a football game, where two teams challenge each other, it is always quite easy at some time of the game to spot who is the attacking one, and who is the defending one.
Hint:
The attacking ones usually end up winning the game.
We can see the same thing happen with traders, there are the ones who have an attack style of trading, and the ones that have a defense style of trading.
At the beginning of a trader career, everybody start on the attacking side.
Usually, the attacking ones have great results until they reach a point in their equity where they feel they have made enough profit, and suddenly and unconsciously they switch style, getting to the defense team.
Or. they face a huge loss and instantly switch to the defense team.
What happen, they don't focus on how much profit they can make anymore, instead, they start to focus on how to protect their capital.
Now that they are on the defensive style, they start placing ridiculous near stoplosses, take trades with a ridiculously high R.R ratio (risk.reward), that again give them a very low percentage of success, or some exasperated traders may as well place some huge bet trying to make a fortune in just one trade.
In many automatic unconscious way, this defensive style of trading is the very reason of the following streak of losses that would lead to the total failure.
There are then the long-term demo traders, the ones who trade naturally on the attacking side on their demo account, but once they switch to real money trading, unconsciously slip to the defensive trading style.
The result of course, is once again failure. I can hear their thoughts: "how is it possible that in demo i have so much success but with real money everything goes wrong?".
Once you fall in the defensive trap, it is very difficult to get back on the attack side.
It take great courage, faith and will power to get back on attack.
Like in a football game, where two teams challenge each other, it is always quite easy at some time of the game to spot who is the attacking one, and who is the defending one.
Hint:
The attacking ones usually end up winning the game.
We can see the same thing happen with traders, there are the ones who have an attack style of trading, and the ones that have a defense style of trading.
At the beginning of a trader career, everybody start on the attacking side.
Usually, the attacking ones have great results until they reach a point in their equity where they feel they have made enough profit, and suddenly and unconsciously they switch style, getting to the defense team.
Or. they face a huge loss and instantly switch to the defense team.
What happen, they don't focus on how much profit they can make anymore, instead, they start to focus on how to protect their capital.
Now that they are on the defensive style, they start placing ridiculous near stoplosses, take trades with a ridiculously high R.R ratio (risk.reward), that again give them a very low percentage of success, or some exasperated traders may as well place some huge bet trying to make a fortune in just one trade.
In many automatic unconscious way, this defensive style of trading is the very reason of the following streak of losses that would lead to the total failure.
There are then the long-term demo traders, the ones who trade naturally on the attacking side on their demo account, but once they switch to real money trading, unconsciously slip to the defensive trading style.
The result of course, is once again failure. I can hear their thoughts: "how is it possible that in demo i have so much success but with real money everything goes wrong?".
Once you fall in the defensive trap, it is very difficult to get back on the attack side.
It take great courage, faith and will power to get back on attack.