how do you improve patience

How to improve patience:
Learn the eastern philosophy of "Detachment".

Here are some physical exercise to improve your patience:

 

1. Do a 10-20 mile walk without preparing for it
2. After lining up at the postal office and its your turn, go back at the end of the line (do this 3 times)
3. Get a 3-5 combination pad lock and unlock it (3 combinations will take you 4hours from 1-1000 combination) so a 5 combination is good
4. Wash you car with a tooth brush
5. Fast for a day but prepare for it and get your doctor for approval
6. Don't speak or make a sound out of your mouth for 24 hours (stay silent for 24 hours)
7. Don't speak or make a sound out of your mouth and lock yourself in a room for 24 hours (just have the necessities) away with no TV or sensory inputs (stay silent for 24 hours)

Extra challenge mentally:
Go get the equations on how to solve a Rubik's cube and and then solve a Rubik's cube

These are easy things to do, make an effort to achieve all these and experience how your mind shifts into a different way of thinking. It's like the karate kid... wax on, wax off... You may not see and understand by doing so the "why", but you will experience the change.

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/...SH20_OU01_.jpg

The easiest solution for learning patience is to make your impulse trades in a practice account. You will either learn that your impulses are usually right (unlikely) or you'll learn that impulse/impatient trades are usually losers.

If you need to have some money in the trade then just trade very small on the impulse trades.

SLEEP

Meditation is very important for a currency trader.

yeah so is Christianity, unfortunately Jews don't last long in this business...

I think everything goes from your nature - if you're impulsive and quick with excitement it would be hard for you to keep patience while trading. The key to emotional control I believe is proper breathing, may be some meditation, counting with eyes closed etc.
But for now you conceive trading as gambling which is not correct. How about starting with building your trading strategy?

Many ways of doing this

1. justify your trades every day for a friend or wife
2. Write down the trade on a sheet which you have to give to a friend or wife..

this comes with time, i had the same problem until my acc got big enough... for you now you need quantity but I need and want quality trades...

i wish you luck

haha, totally.


I remember early on I used to trade mostly off of Daily and 4h charts. It wasn't a patience issue until i started really getting great results. And then I found myself constantly micro managing the trades down to the 5 min. charts and messing things up. I still catch myself doing it occasionally.

So it can work both ways.. having patience but then losing it.

Maybe try a sound alert for when price reaches your pre-determined zone of interest, and don’t get involved until then. A baby monitor could let you go about 100m or more away from your computer and do something else until it calls you back.
And having calm music on while at the computer.

Plan your trade and then trade your plan. But probally not all methods are good for that only if you become a discretionairy trader. Then even you can plan the day for verry big trades.

good one!

hahaha that would really pee me off!

I just open my positions and go out doing some other things. In front of the computer I am hardly patient...

My original post for this thread touched on something a little abstract from the main idea of this thread. This quoted post was, IMO, getting to the meat and potatoes of this question.

Last night, it popped in my head again, and I thought that I would re-post an idea, and experience that helped me with patience, that borrows the way of thinking from the quoted post.

I take my keys everywhere, obviously. They unlock my house, I need them for my car, and my filing cabinets etc. I'm usually pretty careful to put them on the key hook every time, by habit. But there are those occasional times where I will lose them!

Last night, I lost them. I looked all over, and couldn't find them. They were no where, not in the couch, my jacket pocket, in the car, stuck in the door? No. I locked them in my storage closet, where I keep my documents, files etc. Great!

This wasn't the first time that this happened, it happened years before. So what did I do?

I could have found the spare key that I put somewhere? I didn't have a spare key (genius). Break it? Call a locksmith? Nope (not yet). I decided to make some lock picks out of some old hack saw blades, using a bench grinder, and some templates found online. I then learned to pick the lock.

It took me a while to finally pick it, but it was a real lesson in patience. As I still have the picks I made years ago, I used them again last night, took about 10 minutes still though!

But it reminded me of this question, and how the waiting and trying and trying ....and trying had me thinking of how frustrating trading can be at times.

When learning to pick a lock, there is a point where you get so pissed off that it won't work, and you get fed up, and you just want to break it open. It is at this point that you want to detach a bit from yourself, and look at your state of mind, and how it mimics the state of frustration felt at times in trading.

The point at which picking the lock seems futile, and you just want to break it, is similar to losing patience in trading and taking irrational trades, and trading on emotion. The difference is that when picking a lock, this frustration is short term, whereas in trading the frustration can last a while. But it does bring in the frustration aspect of losing patience in a way that few other activities can.

So that's a suggestion that I might make, in the same idea, of the quoted post. I'm def not saying to lock your keys in a closet or a room without having a spare key! But if you ever find yourself in that situation, what else do you have to lose? You'll gain some personal insight, and will learn something pretty neat in the process!

IMO like any other skill or feature, patience can and should be trained - I see it like a part of our constant work to improve ourselves.

I think that best way, how to improve patience is: trade trade trade
or add rule, if you once break your trading strategy and close your positions before setted up take profit .. you will simply will take next day off, without trading

Patience. Or don't trade. Choose one.

Now this may not work for anyone else but it is working for me. I am trading using 15 minute charts and I would jump into trades. Maybe the trade looked good but the candle hadn't closed yet or maybe I talked myself into it. Now I use a new way of doing things so to speak. I have an alarm on my desktop. It goes off every 15 minutes starting at 6am GMT and it stops at 6pm GMT. Between the alarms, I do whatever. Anything. I turn off the news(most of the time). Anyways I have checked ff for the news b4 the day began. Mostly I try to do between the alarms anything that will take my mind off the forex. Watching a movie. Reading the non financial news. Play a game. Talk on the phone even. In reality I can do anything until my alarm goes off. Once I am in a trade I am usually looking at it but for the most part since I was doing something else b4, I am more interested in that. This has changed my trading. I have only been doing this for one week and already I am seeing very good results.

FYI I do believe it is emotional and not patience, but this helps with that anyways.

We've all been through those times.

I plot out the week based on economic events and then from there I plot out technical patterns that may be brewing. If they begin to line up I will get in, this has limited to how much I trade, preventing over trading and hefty donations to the broker.

Dukascopy has a good calendar, they have the EU bond auctions listed too.

http://www.dukascopy.com/swiss/engli...rs/eccalendar/

I been patiently waiting for the Euro correction to lose steam.