Ok, I may have lost a lot of you right there... and I admit, what I said appears just a little hokey, but while you can lose on individual trades, you'll ultimately win in the long run if you follow two golden guidelines:

Now before I share these with you I must caution you that you probably won't like them... in fact you may have even heard them before... and if you have, I hope you take that as a testament to their importance. The reason I want to preface this is because I KNOW that people hate to hear it, but it is this same wisdom that professionals take and apply that make them the professionals they are. Now the 2 guidelines I want to share are:

1 - Have adequate trading capital

2 - Always use stop-loss orders

First off, you've got to have enough trading capital to even consider trading. While you don't have to have a boatload of money to trade successfully, you should have enough to stay in the game. I always suggest to aspiring traders to have at least enough to cover 10 times the average amount you expect to be risking on any given trade.

If your stop-loss orders will usually get you out of the market with no more than a $500 loss on the trade, then you need at least $5,000 total trading capital. (Hey, if you can't pick one winner out of ten trades, you need more help than I can provide you with.) If your average risk/potential loss is closer to $1,000, then you should have about $10,000 of trading capital.

Here's another method of calculation - your total potential loss on three straight losing trades should be equal to no more than one-third of your total trading capital. For example: If you're going to risk an average of $1,000 per trade, then three straight losing trades would amount to a loss of approximately $3,000... therefore, your total starting stake should be at least $9,000 - $10,000.

That brings us to a very key point - you will have losing trades. Trading is risky. I've never met anyone who has a perfect track record. But what makes futures trading great is that you don't need to be 100% correct to be successful - you can earn a fortune even if you're wrong more than you're right... if you know how to manage your risk.

And that brings us to point #2 - Always use reasonable stop-loss orders. There's no way to assemble an accurate statistical figure on this, but from looking at my own trading, as well as that of clients and fellow traders, over the course of many years, I would guess that about 90% of busted trading accounts are the result of someone "falling in love with" a trade. Rather than take a reasonable loss, people pull their stop orders, and stay in a trade - vainly hoping for it to turn back in their favor - until it bankrupts their trading account.

I've seen it happen more times than I can count - and certainly more times than I care to think about. Let me make this as simple as possible for all of us - Never cancel a stop-loss order. Never. Believe me, when a market is close to stopping me out of a position at a loss, I can always easily come up with a dozen "good" reasons to cancel or move my stop. The only problem is they aren't good reasons - they just look good at the time. They're really rationalizations devised to give me hope that I was right, when the market is clearly indicating that I was wrong. Take your losses; take them early; take them when they're cheap and painless. There's no shame in being wrong in your judgment about a market. The only shameful part is being unwilling to admit that you were wrong, and stubbornly clinging to a bad trade.