Good Trades Versus Profitable Trades

Trading is one of the hardest endeavors you can ever undertake. It taxes your emotions, plays games with your mind, and can really bring out traits in your personality that you didn’t realize existed. 

I’ve experienced the good, the bad,an the ugly over the course of my 20 years of trading. And no matter how experienced you are, you are constantly learning new concepts, new ideas, new tactics about trading as well as discovering shortcoming you might now have ever known existed. 

So much of trading is about making good decisions. But so often we mistake profitable decisions with good decisions. It is important to understand that not all profitable trades results in good trades and not all good trades results in profitable trades. 

You can ignore your risk parameters (for example, your stop-losses) and still be profitable. You can keep lowering a stop-loss in order to avoid being stopped out, and ultimately still profit from a trade. Does that mean you made a good trade? No. It simply means your lack of discipline didn’t come back to haunt you. People get away with it every day. The problem is when you don’t make a good trade and you don’t make a profitable trade either, the results to your portfolio can be quite harmful. 

On the other hand, you can hold true to your stop-loss, make a good decision, and let that stop trigger, and the result won’t be a profitable one (unless you were moving your stop-loss up to secure your gains). But despite the loss on the trade and lack of profits you still made a good trade. 

One of my favorite trading coaches, Alexander Elder, once said, “The goal of a successful trader is to make the best trades. Money is secondary.” There is more truth in that one nugget then 99% of all the trading books ever written and that is because, when you boil it down, trading is about making good decisions. Ultimately, if you make enough good decisions, the profits will take care of themselves. Good decisions will also allow you to keep making more good decisions, because you won’t blow your account up either. 

When it comes to trading, have a track record of making good decisions!