Over 90% of traders fail to reach any success simply because they are not equipped for success, especially in key components such as money management and emotional control. This is true for most things in the civilized world. We are programmed for failure and as such as easy prey for the trap that is the financial markets.

If you are bad with money, then guess what, trading wont fix that. I've seen first hand my parents win $500,000 and lose it all in less than 4 years. What they never did was assess their bad habits.

Bad habits are addictions which are fueled by our minds chemical pharmacy. We're all the same, and it is nature's way of allowing us to evolve and stay alive. Habits are automatic programs that start with a memory which then creates an emotion, which in turn creates a chemical which then feeds the body and all its cells. This is a habit; our body's addiction to naturally produced chemicals.

If you keep doing the same thing over and over again, but expect different results, you're fighting a system that has been in creation for millions of years. However, change what you are doing and you break the cycle.

Traders who continuously make the same mistakes are doing it by habit. The problem is that they are unaware they are doing it, or they choose not to accept who they are or what they are doing. Those who become aware and those who become humble will open new exciting doors to much more than just successful trading.

A lot of what occurs soon after beginning a trading career is based on pie in the sky thinking, and very little planning. Apart from needing to construct a business plan to achieve your goals, you need to see yourself as already there doing what needs to be done.

When you were younger and you were deciding what it is you wanted to become you had mental pictures in your mind. This is what helped you to see what interested you the most. If you saw yourself being an engineer and it felt good seeing that in your minds eye, then pursuing that career felt like the right thing to do. Using the markets to achieve your goals is no different.

There are many things you can use your minds eye to imagine, such as your online trading account balance being very large, your transactions being very large, placing less and less trades over time, becoming more accurate in your forecasts or improving your win rate, being emotionally in control as your trades close whether in the black or the red, seeing yourself allowing the really big trades to run for as long as your system permits and so on.

Of course, it only becomes apparent once you begin trading for a while that you need to see yourself doing the opposite of something undesirable (such as cursing at the computer screen), however even when starting out trading for the first time, envisioning your long term goals as being achieved is very necessary.

If you think this is hocus pocus then there's not much I can say other than, there are massive amounts of proven facts and research now available on how our mind functions, and the systems our brain has in place to be able to say, if you're not prepared to imagine yourself as a success on a consistent basis, your brain will give you what it is programmed to give you and if you are like the herd, it will be failure.