Podcast:

How to cope with losing trades

In this video:

00:30 – What do you do when you have a run of bad trades?

01:14 – Accepting the rough with the smooth

02:38 – It’s frustrating and hard to deal with

03:11 – Client makes 11% last week on her trading account

04:09 – Losing weeks are a part of trading

04:55 – Don’t go changing your system

05:24 – Stay away from the forums, control your emotions

What happens when you have multiple losing trades and you're having a really bad trading week? Let's talk about that and more right now.

Hi, Forex Traders, Andrew Mitchem here, the owner of the Forex Trading Coach. Today is Friday, the 4th of March and I want to talk about something that you won't find many people talking about this subject.

What do you do when you have a run of bad trades?

What happens when you have a losing streak? What happens when you have bad days and you have bad weeks? The reason I want to talk about that is because this week, I've had one of my worst trading weeks for many, many months, if not years. It's just been one of those weeks and so I want to address that because how you react to that is actually really important to your longer term success as a Forex trader.

Now, as a trader we have to accept that losing trades are a part of trading and of course, most people understand that, but what happens when you get multiple losing trades all in a row and you had a bad week? That just happens, yes, but it's not that easy to deal with sometimes.

Accepting the rough with the smooth

As traders we need to accept that losing trades are a part of trading, but also accept the rough with the smooth. As an example, the vast majority of my weeks I make profit and make some really good profit, but this week I've made a reasonable loss.

How do you cope with that? Firstly, of course you can control the loss that you take per trade. What you don't want to do is have one or two really bad trades that make massive losses and then have small gains that just claw back a tiny bit, but you still end up with a loss. I like to have controlled risk and equal risk on every trade. Even so, I've had many losing trades this week and overall I'm in a loss. Why's that? It's just been one of those weeks.

I've had retracement trades that have almost retraced to my entry level but they haven't quite, but then they've turned around and gone and hit the full profit but I've not got anything out of the trade because I've not actually been filled into the market. I've had trades that have moved almost to my profit target and then almost hit that level and I haven't been there to watch the trades that have happened overnight, let's say, and by the time I wake up in the morning, look at my charts, it's got within a few pips of my profit target and it's come all the way back down again. I've taken either a small profit or a loss.

I've had other trades that have gone almost down to my stop loss, have just stopped me out by a pip or so and then they've turned around and gone to the profit target. It's very, very frustrating.

It’s frustrating and hard to deal with

There is no doubt about it. It's frustrating, and it's annoying, and it's quite hard to deal with from time to time. When that happens, you just tend to find that that happens trade, after trade, after trade, which is what I've experienced personally this week.

Like I said, longer term, you've got to look at trading as a bigger picture, as over several months, quarters, half years, yearly, et cetera. Don't just get too stressed and too worried on what's happened just today or just this week.

Client makes 11% last week on her trading account

As an example, I had a fantastic e-mail from a client last week who said, “Andrew, I've made over 11% on my account.” Now,