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Seven Tips To Get Control of Your Emotions When Investing in Stocks
By Mike | March 9, 2010
If you’ve ever invested in the stock market, then you probably know that the stock market is highly dependent upon the emotional reactions of its investors. But did you know that emotions are one of the primary reasons why most investors don’t make the kind of money they want? That’s right, by learning how to control your emotions you can significantly impact the success you have in the stock market. Here are 7 tips you can use to help get control of your emotions when you invest.
1) Write Down Your Investment Plan
Writing down and documenting your investment plan is proven to help keep you focused and on track. In order to get what you want from your investments, your plan should include specific investment goals along with a timeframe for achieving them. You should look at your plan regularly to help keep yourself on track and prevent short term situations from distracting you from your investment goals.
2) Plan for the Worst
Always think through as many different scenarios as you can when it comes to your investment plan. Visualize and write out all of the positive and negative situations that could happen to your investments and create a plan for how you’ll respond. Think of it as an emergency plan so you’re always prepared no matter what happens. By doing this easy exercise, you can dramatically decrease or stop your emotional reaction to a situation because you’ll have had to think it through in advance.
3) Focus on Value
If you want to decrease the risk of your emotions taking over, focus your energy on value investing. By focusing on value investing, you will avoid being influenced by the news of the next big “winner.”.” Value investing is a great way to help overcome the emotional roller coaster to profitable investing.
4) Always Set Limits
Setting limits on your investments can significantly decrease your stress level and eliminate your emotional reaction to market news. By including limits for both selling and buying, you’ll make more informed decisions than other emotionally distraught investors. This requires advance planning and discipline to not only create your buy and hold prices but also to initiate them when the market fluctuates. This disciplined action of buying and selling using pre-set limits will help to minimize your potential losses and insulate you from making bad decisions based upon emotion.
5) Invest Regularly
By investing regularly, you can create an investing routine where you make decisions based upon your goals rather than outside influences. This helps to eliminate the need that many inexperienced investors have to “follow the herd” and overreact. By using your plan and investing based upon your goals, it will help insulate you from market volatility.
6) Limit Your Transactions
Often times, the more transactions you make the more likely you are to fall victim to the emotions of the market and lose sight of your long term goals. The more short term transactions you make, the more random your decisions become and the higher the risk. By limiting your transactions you can focus on the longer term trends and decrease your costs.
7) Learn from Your Losses
Anytime you make any type of mistake, take time to consider what went wrong. Then write down this information and figure out how you can use it to your advantage next time. This one simple technique can make your investing even more profitable because you’ll never repeat the same mistake twice.
With these 7 tips you’ll be able to map out your investment goals and keep your emotions in check so you can make your investment portfolio even more profitable.
And by making more profitable investments you can spend more time and money on things you enjoy like spending time with your family, traveling and doing hobbies like taking pictures and then displaying your memories in beautiful wood picture frames (or even gold leaf picture frames). This way you’ll be reminded of the fun times so you’ll continue to stay motivated to invest.
Topics: Investing |
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