MICHEL PIREU: Don’t give in to failure but use the lesson to improve your trading strategy
No-one succeeds with every trade and while it is easy to lose hope it is important to stay in the game
You should be afraid of failure. I know, I know, everyone tells you to embrace failure. But, let’s get real. Failure is not good. Failure sucks. The goal in investing is to succeed. The mistake everyone is making is in confusing loss with failure. You can’t succeed with every investment and you certainly can’t succeed with every trade. But that’s not failure, that’s the nature of the game. They’re not the same thing. You want to take smart risks that offer reasonable potential return and — here’s the good part — offer the best chance of success, not failure. So why do so many traders fail? They underestimate the risks. “There is always the risk,” says John Green. “Something is good and good and good and good, and then all at once it gets awkward.” Michael Moritz of Sequoia was once asked why his firm had thrived for 40 years. “We’ve always been afraid of going out of business,” he said. That’s a rare response in a world where most people step back, see all they’ve achieved, and bre...
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