Making money in stock market is  not an easy game.  Investors usually behave irrationally and emotionally when their money is on the line, thus putting emotions as one of the larger enemies of efficient stock trading.

The most common emotions that affect traders are fear and greed. Fear leads traders to stop trading and to exit good trades earlier, while greed leads them to keep trading more and more and to push the risks to the limits.

Usually, a trader starts to feel fear when he’s on a losing streak or, sometimes, even a couple of losses may be enough. Traders simply feel powerless because they think that whatever they do, they’ll end up losing. They even reach a point where they’re just not able to place a trade.

If you’re in this kind of situation, the first thing you should do is stop and re-think the strategy you’re using, re-evaluate it and see if you did something wrong. Only this way you’ll be able to reach the pace of mind to come back to the market and trade.

And what about greed? Well, greed usually starts as a good thing. We all like to have winning trades, and when you have a couple of them in a row you feel that you’re a true master, that no one can beat you or make you lose. In this phase, you don’t even consider a small loss. And when this happens, you won’t be looking for the “right setup” anymore; you won’t be so demanding with a stock before entering in a trade. You’ll just enter because you know you’ll win. This enormous ego and overconfidence are your worst enemies because they’ll lead you to make mistakes, sometimes, beginner mistakes…

Just like when fear is involved, the best thing to do is to stop and re-evaluate. Get back the discipline that you lost along the way.

It’s not easy to be in control of your emotions and be rational all the time. And when you feel you’re losing it, have the discipline to stop before you have more losses.