In order to develop the right mindset, to have a trader's psyche, youneed to know what to expect when day trading. You must be prepared for avariety of emotions so that you can monitor them instead of letting themcontrol you. Only by staying on top of your emotions can you stay focused onthe key to successful day trading: maintaining a consistently profitablelong-term strategy in the middle of many smaller short-term wins and losses,even when these short-term outcomes seem overly distracting. To keep that focus,develop the traits of a trader's psyche in yourself.

Successful traders know that success means consistency more than itmeans immediate profits. Of course traders want to make money, but to do thatconsistently, you may have to learn by dealing with setbacks and unimpressivegains. The trick is not only to make money off of trades but to learn WHY youmade that money. And if you simply get lucky now and then, you haven't learnedanything you can turn into a consistent strategy of success over a career, oreven a lifetime, of day trading.

That's why successful traders bank on consistent profits. They knowthat ignoring the small-profit trades and angling for a ?grand slam? is a sureway to lose money. No one can repeatedly predict huge gains on any one trade.But many people can and do predict a host of small-profit trades that createthe same, if not more, profit than people who get extremely lucky once ortwice.

Besides, you know that your system is working well if you can almostalways profit, even on a small scale. You know you're working in the rightdirection and only have to revise your plan to increase profits rather thanstarting over completely. Someone who depends on making a ?grand slam? does nothave that same insight and is essentially just gambling.

For that reason, it is vital to understand that successful tradersrecognize that a ?good? trade has nothing to do with profits or losses.Evaluate your trades on whether or not they followed your trading plan to theletter. Even if you do lose money, as long as you stick to your plan, you havemade a ?good? trade. At the end of the week or month (or whenever youreevaluate your strategy), you can look at profits and losses, but you willalso be looking at overall trends. And tweaking trends rather than reacting toindividual trades is much more likely to help you develop a consistentlyprofitable trading career.

If you can integrate these insights into your own psychologicalmindset, you'll gain a sig?nificant edge in the market. I can't stress thisenough: the right mindset is one of the keys to investment success, and mosttraders fail to understand this.