If you are a trader then you want to do as well as you can with your trades. If you are fortunate, you will be able to spot real winners and profit from most of your trades.

Unfortunately, not all of your trades are going to work out the way you might anticipate and naturally, that will lead to disappointment.

So, one way to help stem some of that disappointment is to lower your expectations. This is not to say that you do not want to try to ride your trades to their maximum but if you try to squeeze out as much as possible in each trade you are bound to become frustrated.

Maybe one thing you can try when you make a trade is to lower your expectation in half. In other words, if you think you are entering a position with a goal of making 10% lower it to 5%. This way, if you achieve that 5% goal, anything over it will then become gravy.

If you achieve that 5% you can then decide if that is enough or at the very least, if you hold the position and it continues to rise, you can then set your minimum profit at 5%, having achieved your original goal.

If you are a trader, you need to fear the market at all times. This does not mean you need to wake up every day shaking and trembling. What it does mean is you need to fear it enough to know that out of nowhere it can turn on you and turn your good trades into bad ones fast.

It happens something like this. You take a long position in a stock and ride it up nicely. You get lulled into complacency forgetting that the market has a way of pulling out the rug from underneath you. All of the sudden, the market reverses and your stock goes with it. You don't worry too much about it, and as your stock pulls back you figure no big deal the selling will soon subside.

Unfortunately for you, the selling does not stop; in fact, you will come to learn in the days ahead that it had just started pulling back. Before you know it, the stock falls below your entry price and now you are not happy. In fact, you are so mad that you just dump it, and that great profit you had just a few days earlier is long gone.

This is why you need to keep that fear factor in your consciousness at all times, because unless you do, you will be lulled to sleep. Keep this in mind particularly if you have made a nice profit, stochastics are high and if you are moving towards important resistance.

Do you remember Franklin D Roosevelt's very famous saying, there is nothing to fear but fear itself? When he said that, he forgot the caveat, "unless you are trading in the stock market!"