[idaxtrader]

In every one of them I lost money. It served me right, because I was trying to force the market into giving me what it didn't have to give to wit, opportunities for making money.

More than once in the past I had run up a shoe string into hundreds of thousands. Sooner or later the market would offer me an opportunity.

I convinced myself that whatever was wrong was wrong with me and not with the market. Now what could be the trouble with me? I asked myself that question in the same spirit in which I always study the various phases of my trading problems.

I thought about it calmly and came to, the conclusion that my main trouble came from worrying over the money I owed. I was never free from the mental discomfort of it.

As I studied the problem I saw that it wasn't a case that called for reading the tape but for reading my own self. I quite cold-bloodedly reached the conclusion that I would never be able to accomplish anything useful so long as I was worried.

To take the cold-blooded, dispassionate attitude toward the game that comes from the ability to afford a few minor losses such as I often incurred in testing the market before putting down the big bet.

Must also know himself and provide against his own weaknesses. There is no need to feel anger over being human. I have come to feel that it is as necessary to know how to read myself as to know how to read the tape. I have studied and reckoned on my own reactions to given impulses or to the inevitable temptations of an active market, quite in the same mood and spirit as I have considered crop conditions or analysed reports of earnings.

But I sat tight and instead of listening to my loud-mouthed hopes or to my clamorous beliefs I heeded only the level voice of my experience and the counsel of common sense.

As a matter of fact I wasn't the same man, for where I had been harassed and wrong I was now at ease and right.