If the title of this article was "Why A Forex Trading Profit Is Your Best Friend" then you'd probably feel that this was a perfectly reasonable title, but how on earth can any Forex trader view the arrival of a trading loss in the same way that he would view the arrival of a good friend? Well, I'll let you into a secret - the most successful traders do just that.
Many years ago a good friend of mine started a new job as an insurance salesman and I don't think I'd ever seen anyone so fired up and ready to go. When I saw him a month or so later though he was completely dejected and had left his new job.
The problem he had encountered was a common problem in this and many other industries - that or rejection. In order to earn his commission he had to find potential customers and that meant getting on the telephone and cold calling people in the hope of being able to make an appointment with them to discuss their insurance needs. Now this was a simple enough process (the company even gave him telephone training and a script to follow) but nine times out of ten he would fail to make an appointment and he saw the rejection of his offer as a failure on his part. After a couple of weeks of facing failure day after day, he simply couldn't face picking up the telephone.
The truth of the matter was of course that he had not failed at all and that finding one person out of ten chosen at random who was prepared to talk to a complete stranger about their insurance needs was actually pretty good going. What he had experienced was nothing more than the way the insurance industry works and the problem didn't lie in the fact that his approaches were being rejected, but in the fact that he had interpreted this as being a failure on his part.
Now you're probably asking yourself at this point just what this story has to do with Forex trading and the answer is simple. Every day people lose heart and leave the Forex market because, after several failed trades, they see themselves as having failed and, just like my insurance salesman friend, they turn what is nothing more than a normal part of trading into a personal failure.
Losses are an inevitable part of the trading game and even the most successful traders have trades that lose them money every day. They succeed however because they accept losses as a part of normal trading and deal with their losses accordingly.
Successful insurance salesmen actually like being rejected nine times out of ten because, knowing that it is an inevitable part of the job, they choose to view each rejection as bringing them one step nearer to that call when they'll make an appointment. As they receive one rejection after the next their spirits actually rise because they know they're getting closer to that successful call.
In the world of Forex trading no matter how good you are at analyzing the market you're not going to get it right every time and some trades will go against you. But each losing trade not only provides you with a valuable learning experience but also brings you one step closer to your next profitable trade.
Accepting loses as a normal part of trading and part of the dynamics of the market, rather than viewing each loss as a personal failure, is just one of the many things that separate the successful traders from those that simply scrape by or decide that perhaps Forex trading is not for them.
