How I Built Patience in Trading (And Why It Changed Everything)

How you can build patience so you can really use it in trading

Over all social media people talk about patience in trading, but honestly most of them talk about it just because it sounds good. It is something like that you need to be disciplined so you don’t need the motivation to go to the gym. These concepts are so broad that almost anyone can talk about it even if they do no thave close experience with that. So I would like you to give you some “hindsight” on how I think that I built the patience myself. Because I was not always like this. I am the ADHD kid who couldn’t sit on one place when I was younger and just couldn’t wait for anything. But right now I am willing to wait weeks for trade withou taking stupid trades and also I am trading swing positions, so I hold trades longer than a week in many cases.

For me, patience is not something I developed directly in front of charts. With experience in the charts it gets better, but before that you need to try to build it in your life first.

Since I was quite hungry for being patient, I tried many exercises and I think that some of them really helped me to develop it. I know that this might sound a weird little bit, but I think that being weird is the way to go. I do not think that this will work for you, but I will tell you what worked for me.

I realized that if I couldn’t control myself in small situations, I wouldn’t be able to control myself in the market. So I began with simple actions. When I prepared food, I wouldn’t eat it immediately. I would let it sit for a while. It sounds insignificant and stupid, but I did that anyway. Of coursse don’t wait too long so your food gets cold, but take some pause before you eat. I just prepared the food and just did not eat it right away.

At the same time, I was trying to shift my thinking to longterm. In most of my daily decisions, I started to ask myself what the long-term impact will be. I prefer to live way below my live standards I can afford. I’ve lived like that my whole life. So this was not so hard for me because it is almost natural for me. I was raised that way. I think that this helped me a lot. Sometimes it might be exhausting a bit, because almost anything I do, I just think about what impact will it have on my future - positive or negative. Based on that I make my decisions. Might not be for everybody, but for me it works.

Also when something happens in life or in trading, people tend to act emotionally right away and just think it’s this way because blah blah. I am trying to pause and ask what is actually happening and how to solve it. Instead of focusing on my feelings in the moment, I focus on the solution. Sometimes that means being extremely calm, almost like a stone. But this approach works, because If you react to every loss, every move, every fluctuation, you will exhaust yourself, sooner or later. If you treat problems as situations to solve rather than emotional attacks, you stay stable. But of course all of these things I am telling you have it’s own negatives and can’t be used in relationships for example. So separate that from your career.

To close these thoughts here I want to tell you something which contradicts the first sentences of this letter but it is that you cannot build patience in trading without trading. Thinking about becoming a good trader will not make you one. It’s the same as wanting to be the best football player in the world but never playing football. You have to trade. You have to experience losses. You have to make mistakes. Then you analyze what went wrong, adjust and try again. Improvement comes from iteration. This is also the reason why I have put it as the last point of this what I did. Your daily life matters more than trading and if you act someway in your daily life, probably you will act that way in trading too. Doesn’t matter if it is positive or negative.

You have to understand that trading income is not stable. Some months you make nothing. Some months you make a lot. The strong months must cover the weak ones and this is the reason why you need to build patience. Without patience you just can’t wait through these bad months and you will just do nonsense decisions along the way. At this point also matters a lot your capital size you are trading. If you want to go full-time, you need an account large enough that even a relatively small percentage return can cover a meaningful portion of your yearly expenses. I can almost guarantee you that you will not live well from small account size. It is just not possible. Even if you have big account it will be pretty hard, believe me. So don’t stress yourself even more with pushing yourself to be full-time trader with $1,000 on the trading account.