I can't believe it's only 4 weeks until Christmas!

We've got the Christmas ads running on the TV here already...

The local grocery store has the Christmas decorations up...

And they're even playing Christmas carols - can you believe that?

At home my 5-year-old daughter is already priming me for what she wants from Santa this year, which by the way is pretty much everything on TV right now!

2017 has gone by really fast and we're coming into a time of reflection and rest, time to take a break if you can, and so I wanted to take a few minutes in this weeks Trading Thought to talk about balance, both in trading and in life.

Pretty early on in my trading journey I was absolutely consumed by trading.

I lived and breathed it, it was all I could think about and all I wanted to do was quit my corporate job and trade for a living.

By day I was working a full-time job in a bank, and at night I was staying up late to day trade the ES. I joined a trading room and my wicked plan was to get a few hours sleep after my day job so I could then trade the US session during the night, and then when the US markets closed I would have a brief rest before I went off to work for the day.

Sounds crazy right?

Well at the time I thought it was a great plan, but I'm sure we can all see how poor it really was.

You can probably guess what happened too.

It wasn't sustainable.

I was only able to do it for a short period of time before lack of sleep impacted not only my trading, which sucked by the way, but it also started impacting my day job and it also pissed off my girlfriend at the time because...

I wanted to watch 1 minute bars more than watch a movie with her!

So, at that time there was no balance in my life, and my trading, health, relationships and life really suffered.

In this weeks Trading Thought, I want to share some thoughts from Linda Raschke on how Balance can make us better traders.

Then after that I have a small announcement to share, so take a listen to some nuggets of wisdom from Linda first.

Disclaimer: Trading in the financial markets involves a substantial risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. All content produced by Better System Trader is for informational or educational purposes only and does not constitute trading or investment advice. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.