Trading in the Zone Quotes

“I AM A CONSISTENT WINNER BECAUSE: 1. I objectively identify my edges. 2. I predefine the risk of every trade. 3. I completely accept the risk or I am willing to let go of the trade. 4. I act on my edges without reservation or hesitation. 5. I pay myself as the market makes money available to me. 6. I continually monitor my susceptibility for making errors. 7. I understand the absolute necessity of these principles of consistent success and, therefore, I never violate them.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“A probabilistic mind-set pertaining to trading consists of five fundamental truths. 1. Anything can happen. 2. You don’t need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money. 3. There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge. 4. An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another. 5. Every moment in the market is unique.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“Most traders have absolutely no concept of what it means to be a risk-taker in the way a successful trader thinks about risk. The best traders not only take the risk, they have also learned to accept and embrace that risk. There is a huge psychological gap between assuming you are a risk-taker because you put on trades and fully accepting the risks inherent in each trade. When you fully accept the risks, it will have profound implications on your bottom-line performance.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“The hard, cold reality of trading is that every trade has an uncertain outcome.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“a greater probability of one thing happening over another. In a sense, technical analysis allows you”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“the typical trader wants to be right on every single trade. He is desperately”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“We have to be careful about what we project out into the future, because nothing else has the potential to create more unhappiness and emotional misery than an unfulfilled expectation.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“Learning to accept the risk is a trading skill—the most important skill you can learn.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“When you learn the trading skill of risk acceptance, the market will not be able to generate information that you define or interpret as painful. If the information the market generates doesn’t have the potential to cause you emotional pain, there’s nothing to avoid. It is just information, telling you what the possibilities are. This is called an objective perspective—one that is not skewed or distorted by what you are afraid is going to happen or not happen.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“Remember our definition of a winning attitude: a positive expectation of your efforts with an acceptance that whatever results you get are a perfect reflection of your level of development and what you need to learn to do better.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“All of us are born into some sort of social environment. A social environment (or society), whether its a family, city, state, or country, implies the existence of structure. Social structures consist of rules, restrictions, boundaries, and a set of beliefs that become a code of behavior that limits the ways in which individuals within that social structure can or cannot express themselves. Furthermore, most of the limitations of social structure were established before we are born. In other words, by the time any of us get here, most of the social structure governing our individual expression is in place and well entrenched.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“When you learn the trading skill of risk acceptance, the market will not be able to generate information that you define or interpret as painful.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“This lack of support is not simply an absence of encouragement. It can be as deep as the outright denial of some particular way in which we want to express ourselves.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“However, market analysis is not the path to consistent results. It will not solve the trading problems created by lack of confidence, lack of discipline, or improper focus.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“Unless you learn to completely accept the possibility of an uncertain outcome, you will try either consciously or unconsciously to avoid any possibility you define as painful.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“When you genuinely accept the risks, you will be at peace with any outcome. When you’re at peace with any outcome, you will experience a carefree, objective state of mind, where you make yourself available to perceive and act upon whatever the market is offering you (from its perspective) at any given “now moment.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“1. Anything can happen. 2. You don’t need to know what is going to happen next in order to make money. 3. There is a random distribution between wins and losses for any given set of variables that define an edge. 4. An edge is nothing more than an indication of a higher probability of one thing happening over another. 5. Every moment in the market is unique.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“So if you are afraid of being wrong or losing money, it means you will never learn enough to compensate for the negative effects these fears will have on your ability to be objective and your ability to act without hesitation.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“How do we remain disciplined, focused, and confident in the face of constant uncertainty?”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“Everyone who trades ends up learning something about the markets; very few people who trade ever learn the attitudes that are absolutely essential to becoming a consistent winner.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“1. I objectively identify my edges. 2. I predefine the risk of every trade. 3. I completely accept the risk or I am willing to let go of the trade. 4. I act on my edges without reservation or hesitation. 5. I pay myself as the market makes money available to me. 6. I continually monitor my susceptibility for making errors.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“consistency is a state of mind that, once achieved, won’t allow you to “be” any other way.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“If you are unable to trade without the slightest bit of emotional discomfort (specifically, fear), then you have not learned how to accept the risks inherent in trading. This is a big problem, because to whatever degree you haven’t accepted the risk, is the same degree to which you will avoid the risk. Trying to avoid something that is unavoidable will have disastrous effects on your ability to trade successfully.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“The winners have attained a mind-set—a unique set of attitudes—that allows them to remain disciplined, focused, and, above all, confident in spite of the adverse conditions. As a result, they are no longer susceptible to the common fears and trading errors that plague everyone else.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“When you operate from the assumption that more or better analysis will create consistency, you will be driven to gather as many market variables as possible into your arsenal of trading tools. But what happens then? You are still disappointed and betrayed by the markets, time and again, because of something you didn’t see or give enough consideration to. It will feel like you can’t trust the markets; but the reality is, you can’t trust yourself.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“The best traders aren’t afraid. They aren’t afraid because they have developed attitudes that give them the greatest degree of mental flexibility to flow in and out of trades based on what the market is telling them about the possibilities from its perspective. At the same time, the best traders have developed attitudes that prevent them from getting reckless.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“Those traders who have confidence in their own trades, who trust themselves to do what needs to be done without hesitation, are the ones who become successful. They no longer fear the erratic behavior of the market. They learn to focus on the information that helps them spot opportunities to make a profit, rather than focusing on the information that reinforces their fears.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“People normally describe this kind of internal mental shift as an “ah, ha” experience, or the moment when the light goes on. Everyone has had these kinds of experiences, and there are some common qualities associated with them. First, we usually feel different. The world even seems different, as if it had suddenly changed. Typically, we might say at the moment of the breakthrough something like, “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” or, “It was right in front of me the whole time, but I just didn’t see it”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“you asked me to distill trading down to its simplest form, I would say that it is a pattern recognition numbers game.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude

“They create our expectations. Keep in mind that an expectation is a belief projected into some future moment. Since we can’t expect something we don’t know about, we could also say that an expectation is what we know projected into some future moment.”
― Mark Douglas, Trading in the Zone: Master the Market with Confidence, Discipline, and a Winning Attitude