The game of speculation is hard. Striving to play this game full time is almost an impossible task. Most will fail, and in most cases to fail is not to blow up your account, but rather, to give up and to continue doing what you have been doing this whole time (you know, your real job…).

Those that are inclined to keep going will generally find some measure of success. Hopefully, this measure will be enough to afford a standard of living that meets all your material needs with only a tiny bit of worry about the future (one is not a prudent human being if one has absolutely no worry about what the future holds).

So here are some principles I like to remind myself:

• Be in what is going up
• Ride winners
• Avoid what is going down
• Cut losers
• Do your own work
• Don’t let negativity pervade your thinking
• Market trend is always driven by liquidity
• The rules of the game are always changing
• To make money you must hold with conviction
• Conviction is a luxury for those on the sidelines
• Always have an exit before you enter
• Only a couple of stocks/ sectors make all the money in bull runs- be in those
• No certainty that a fact you just learned is not already priced in
• Price doesn’t care what you just learned
• You are hard wired for survival, not trading successfully
• Think only about the trade at hand, not making or losing money
• Markets are bigger than anyone- manipulation doesn’t matter

Some of these (especially “ride winners/ cut losers”) sound so simple that they can be taken for granted, but if you actually take the time to reflect on your own actions in the marketplace and all the stuff you have in your head that you have learned over the years and try to apply those little experiences to living these principles, you will see they are anything but obvious.