Have you ever considered that being a trader could dramatically help improve your quality of life outside the trading and financial world?

In our family, we have implemented a stop-loss. Not in trading. Well, of course, I use the stop-losses in my trading because it’s good practice, saves your life, saves your financial life and protects you from having bigger losses than you’re comfortable with.

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How can you use a stop-loss in everyday life?

We have implemented a stop-loss on movies. So we have a movie stop-loss because there is so much crap now that COVID has been around haunting us for almost two years. There are no good movies left since we’ve watched them all. And so, the number of films that we turn on and we get half an hour into it. And it’s like, “Oh my God, this is so boring. Another crap movie. I wish COVID would go away so we can get some more good movies.”

But what we have now is a movie stop-loss. So 30 minutes into a movie, if the movie is not gripping us, we turn it off, and that’s it. And we move on to the next one because that way we don’t waste two to three hours of our life watching some crap movie. And it’s the same thing in trading. You have a stop-loss so that when a trade goes against you, you don’t have to sit with it and keep losing more money, and wasting your financial resources.

Why waste your life? Implement a movie stop-loss. Thirty minutes into the movie, if it’s no good, cut the movie, move on to the next one, and live to have a happier day.

Where else could thinking like a trader improve your life?

Well, you can use a time-stop. Time-stops in trading, you use them because the signal to buy has a specific duration, a certain lifespan. And so, in some systems, if the trade hasn’t played out effectively and given you a favourable outcome within a certain number of days or bars, then you implement your time-stop, which gets you out of the trade.

In life, you could implement a time-stop on all sorts of things. I’ve implemented time-stops on investments outside the stock market – investments where I’ll give it a certain amount of time to play out. And if it doesn’t work the way I expect it, I just cut it, sell the investment, and move on.

It could also be on a specific activity. If you haven’t gotten into it in a certain amount of time, then cut it and move on. Time-stops can be helpful as well. But stop-losses on movies and books have changed my life.

I’ve had the compulsion to watch the whole movie just because I started it. I’ve had the compulsion to read the entire dead boring book just because I started it. But you don’t have to. Implement a stop-loss. It’ll change your life, not just in trading, but also in your personal life as well.

Where else could you think like a trader in life? Comment below. Let me know your ideas because I want to improve my life as well. Where could you use trading principles in everyday life to make things better for you?

 

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Adrian Reid Founder and CEO
Adrian is a full-time private trader based in Australia and also the Founder and Trading Coach at Enlightened Stock Trading, which focuses on educating and supporting traders on their journey to profitable systems trading. Following his successful adoption of systematic trading which generated him hundreds of thousands of dollars a year using just 30 minutes a day to manage his system trading workflow, Adrian made the easy decision to leave his professional work in the corporate world in 2012. Adrian trades long/short across US, Australian and international stock markets and the cryptocurrency markets. His trading systems are now fully automated and have consistently outperformed international share markets with dramatically reduced risk over the past 20+ years. Adrian focuses on building portfolios of profitable, stable and robust long term trading systems to beat market returns with high risk adjusted returns. Adrian teaches traders from all over the world how to get profitable, confident and consistent by trading systematically and backtesting their own trading systems. He helps profitable traders grow and smooth returns by implementing a portfolio of trading systems to make money from different markets and market conditions.