#783 - How Do I Stop Feeling Impatient When Trading Options?
Hey everyone. This is Kirk here again from Option Alpha and welcome back to the daily call. Today, we’re going to answer the question, “How do I stop feeling impatient when trading options?” Now, look. I think this is a really important topic because a lot of traders feel like when they start trading options, they have this sense of anxiety that starts to swell up in their body where they get impatient waiting for trades to come around or for positions to come in after they’ve been waiting for weeks and weeks for something to happen and still nothing happens. But I think that we have to first understand two things first about impatience before we can move forward and start to conquer it in our trading. The first thing we have to understand is that impatience is not a lack of patience. It’s completely different. Impatience is basically a reaction to something happening and it gets triggered under very certain circumstances. It’s not that you are either patient or impatient. It’s that you can be patient, but you can be triggered into this state of being impatient because you’re triggered to go after something that happened or some special set of circumstances that motivates you differently. Now, the second thing you have to understand is that impatience then is triggered mostly when we have a goal and then we realize that we’re not going to reach it or it’s going to cost us more potentially to reach that goal. And so, that’s where things get triggered. For a trader, what happens is that they start to convert over to options trading or they start trading options and they become impatient and it’s because they have a goal potentially to make a lot of money very quickly and they realize that maybe it’s going to cost more or it’s going to take longer to reach that goal. I think it’s actually probably a very typical scenario. A lot of people transition from stocks to options because they see that they can make more money with options potentially, but they don’t realize the time and effort and the patience that’s required in order to be able to reach that level of success. And so, because they’re triggered to have this goal, make more money in a faster period of time or increase their returns, have no drawdowns, that’s the goal and then when they realize, “Oh my, gosh. This is a high probability system. It’s not a 100% system. This means I got to hold contracts for 30 days and wait for this trade to come all the way in after 30 days. This means that I might have to hold a couple of losers during the process and I might have to trade through those losers.” they become impatient and their impatience is not that they’re impatient people. It’s just that they were triggered because their goal was out of alignment with how much it would cost or how much time it would take to reach that level of success. And so, I think the way to cure impatience if you are a trader, is to realign your priorities. Get your goals and get your expectations set up correctly and when you do, you’ll find that you become less impatient and you become more patient with trading. You don’t worry about a trade that goes against you because you know it’s part of the process. You don’t worry that you have 10 trades that are starting to lose halfway through the month because you know potentially five of those are going to come all the way back around. And so, if you have the right expectations, you have readjusted your goals, I think you’ll start to feel yourself becoming more and more patient and less and less stressful when trading. Again, to me, somebody who’s impatient with trading just has a misalignment in goals and expectations. They think that their goals are going to be achieved potentially in the near future or very quickly. I say a lot of people look for overnight success and they tell me no, but the reality is that many do. And so, when they realize that options trading is not that, then they start to become impatient, they start to become irritable, irrational, they do things in order to try to cut steps and try to hack their way through the process, all long the while, they’re basically thrashing and throbbing, keeps them contained right where they are. And so, hopefully this helps out. Again, if you are feeling impatient about it, just try to look at your goals and try to look at your expectations a little bit differently first and that might help realign yourself into a less stressful trading environment. Hopefully this helps out. As always, if you guys have any questions, let me know and until next time, happy trading.