Patience & Greed
Advice on Trading, Part 2
This is Part 2 of an ongoing series on trading advice. If you’re just joining, start with the series introduction here. Each post stands on its own, but they’re better read together.
In Part 1 we talked about journaling, and why building an honest record of your decisions is the foundation everything else in your trading depends on. This piece is about what you’ll find when you start reviewing that journal honestly. Almost every bad trade you’ve ever taken traces back to one of two things: you were too early, too late, too big, or too stubborn, and underneath all of it, if you look closely enough, you’ll almost always find the same culprit. Greed. And almost every good trade you’ve ever taken, the ones where you waited for your price, sized correctly, cut the loss cleanly, or let the winner run, those trace back to something else. Patience. Learning to tell the difference between the two, in real time, while you’re sitting at your screens and the market is moving, is one of the most important skills you can build as a trader.
If I had to name the single greatest enemy of any trader, it would be greed. And if I had to name the single greatest asset, it would be patience. Some people use the word discipline instead of patience, and they’re not wrong, but I think patience is the more accurate word. Discipline implies following rules. Patience implies something deeper, a fundamental acceptance that the market will give you what it gives you, and that your job is to be ready when it does, not to force it.
Understanding the difference between the two isn’t enough on its own. What actually changes your trading is learning to recognize which one is driving your decisions in the moment. Because here’s the thing: greed rarely announces itself. It shows up dressed as conviction, as urgency, as a gut feeling that this one is different. The goal of this piece isn’t to tell you that patience is good and greed is bad. You already know that. The goal is to help you get better at spotting greed before it costs you, and to give you a clearer picture of what patience actually looks like in practice.
Take entries. When a setup is forming, greed tells you to get in now before you miss it. Patience tells you to wait for your price and let it come to you. If it doesn’t fill, that’s fine. Another setup is coming. I can’t tell you how many bad trades I’ve taken over the years because I chased an entry I missed or jumped in before the setup had fully developed. Every one of those trades started with the same feeling, urgency. That urgency is almost always greed talking, and it’s almost always wrong.
Sizing is another place greed does serious damage. Patience understands that trading is a marathon and is content to let compounding do its work gradually, increasing size as the account grows and the edge proves itself. Greed can’t stomach that pace. It wants to make serious money right now, so it trades too big, and it usually ends up blowing account after account until there’s nothing left to trade. If you’ve ever looked at your account size, done the math on what a reasonable return looks like, and thought “that’s not enough, I need to make more than that,” you’ve felt exactly what I’m describing. That thought is worth paying attention to.
The place patience and greed show up most clearly though is in how you manage a trade once you’re in it. Patient traders keep losses small and let winners run. When a trade’s thesis is invalidated they cut it quickly, and when a trade is working they let it breathe, willing to give back a little profit to maximize the potential of the move. Greed does the exact opposite. It holds losers because it can’t stomach booking the loss, and it exits winners early because it’s terrified of giving profit back. The result is big losses and small wins, which is a mathematically losing formula regardless of how often you’re right. If that pattern sounds familiar, greed is likely more involved in your trading than you realize.
Here’s what I want you to understand about all of this: every trader feels greed. It’s a normal human emotion and we’re all here to make money, so pretending it doesn’t exist would be dishonest. The goal isn’t to eliminate it. The goal is to widen the gap between feeling it and acting on it.
That gap is where patience lives.
When you feel the urge to chase an entry, size up because you’re frustrated, hold a loser longer than you should, or exit a winner too early, pause. Ask yourself honestly whether that decision is coming from your process or from something else. The more consistently you ask that question, the more often you’ll catch greed before it does damage, and the wider that gap will get. Patience isn’t something you either have or you don’t. It’s something you build, one interrupted impulse at a time.
Next in the series, we're going to talk about something nobody wants to hear but everyone needs to. The market is one of the most competitive environments on the planet, and most traders vastly underestimate what it takes to seriously compete in it. That's Part 3.
Thank you mate
Really needed this.