|  OCT 1989

Are you piloting your trading with safety? by Ana Maria Wilson

Are you piloting your trading with safety? by Ana Maria Wilson As a full-time trader of highly speculative stock and commodity options armed with a basically sound system, I'm always looking for ways to strengthen the weakest link in my trading program: the human factor. Specifically, I find challenge in maintaining the discipline to respect a set of trading criteria that I've: • designed to protect profits and preserve capital, • arrived at after much research and not a few costly mistakes, and • laid down clearly in writing to avoid any deviation from a prudent trading path. I regret to say that at trading time, I have rarely allowed this cool and detached assessment to prevail. It's been my experience that at times when the satisfaction of the criteria to enter or exit a position is borderline or while the trade is in progress, when judgment is the least clear and emotions are engaged, I have bent, twisted or outright disregarded my own criteria for some arcane hunch that this time things were different.

by Ana Maria Wilson