Motivational Trading Quotes For Traders (Success And Mindset)

We believe the best way to learn to trade is by backtesting and trial and error, but you can get valuable input from traders who have been successful.

This post is a collection of some of the top motivational trading quotes we have collected during the last 20 years.

The post is a work in progress and we add more quotes from time to time.

The article has trading quotes from the following people:

Edwin LeFevre, The Reminiscences of a Stock Operator:

The speculator’s chief enemies are always boring from within. It is inseparable from human nature to hope and to fear. In speculation when the market goes against you you hope that every day will be the last day – and you lose more than you should had you not listened to hope to the same ally that is so potent a success-bringer to empire builders and pioneers, big and little. And when the market goes your way you become fearful that the next day will take away your profit, and you get out – too soon. Fear keeps you from making as much money as you ought to. The successful trader has to fight these two deep-seated instincts. He has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping he must fear; instead of fearing he must hope. He must fear that his loss may develop into a much bigger loss, and hope that his profit may become a big profit. It is absolutely wrong to gamble in stocks the way the average man does.

I came out in fine shape. The newspapers said that Larry Livingston, the Boy Plunger, had made several millions. Well, I was worth over one million after the close of business that day. But my biggest winnings were not in dollars but in the intangibles: I had been right, I had looked ahead and followed a clear cut plan. I had learned what a man must do in order to make big money; I was permanently out of the gambler class; I had at least learned to trade intelligently in a big way. It was a day of days for me.

I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out … Of all speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game … Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit … Losing money is the least of my troubles. A loss never bothers me after I take it. I forget it overnight. But being wrong – not taking the loss – that is what does the damage to the pocketbook and to the soul.

There is what I call the behaviors of a stock, actions that enable you to judge whether or not it is going to proceed in accordance with the precedents that your observation has noted. If a stock doesn’t act right, then don’t touch it: because, being unable to tell precisely what is wrong, you cannot tell which way it is going. No diagnosis, no prognosis. No prognosis, no profit.

I was playing a system and not a favorite stock or backing opinions. All I knew was the arithmetic of it. As a matter of fact, mine was the ideal way to operate in a bucket shop, where all that a trader does is to bet on fluctuations as they are printed by the ticker on the tape … Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can’t be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. I’ve never forgotten that. I suppose I really manage to remember when and how it happened. The fact that I remember that way is my way of capitalizing experience … Those quotations did not represent prices of stocks to me, so many dollars per share. They were numbers. Of course, they meant something. They were always changing. It was all I had to be interested in – the changes. Why did they change? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I didn’t think about that. I simply saw that they changed … That is how I first came to be interested in the behaviour of prices.

Juel Anderson:

Juel Anderson was not a trader but a poker player. We wrote a summary of Juel Anderson’s book called Sex, Poker (Trading), and Dying.

Here are some brilliant quotes from Anderson’s book:

Gambling is difficult. In some respects it is the most difficult of all endeavours. To succeed takes an enormous conviction and commitment. Most individuals do not succeed because of the inability to know themselves ….and the inability to control their own actions. In gambling the only asset you have is yourself. The majority of individuals simply do not have the capacity to be able to depend solely on nothing more than themselves. The reasons are many, but the main one is the self developed habits or traits that undermine the very structure you are dependent on … In gambling you set the guidelines and make the rules. In effect, you become God. When you are God it is easy to change the rules. You simply say, ‘Well they do not really apply to me’.

The biggest money burner I’ve ever known is called ”public opinion”.

The saddest epitah you will ever read is this:” Here lies a man who never took a chance….He died anyway.”

You have to do the things you don’t like in order to do some of the things you do like.

It’s luck, but not dumb luck. It takes discipline and some intellect to position yourself on the right side of luck.

Poker is an intensely emotional game. More than any other endeavour, it exposes the different personality traits in individuals. Because the stakes are high and the risk is great, personality and emotions are magnified.  (Replace poker with trading.)

Emotions, not logic, move the world.

In the insurance actuarial business, there is God. This God is “The law of big numbers”.

Survival is a form of winning until you can really win.

When the pressure is on, when the situation is critical, the result is the tyranny of our dominant personality trait.

The very worst time to learn anything about yourself or your opponent is when you’re involved in a hand. The information is skewed, prejudical. Too often you will see only what you want to see or what you don’t want to see. If you’re involved, the information you receive and the store will always be emotionally tainted.

As a poker player, you’re always naked and exposed.

You can’t be blind to the risk even when the odds are in your favour.

I could give you 100 other examples of how the game and the winning or losing of it is affected by this mere inch. …It’s not the big things that determine success. It’s the attention to and mastering of the small details that so very often decide success.

Victor Niederhoffer and Tom Wiswell:

The motivational quotes in this section are taken from The Education Of A Speculator, but they are made by both Nierhoffer and Tom Wiswell, a checkers player.

The winner of a match is not always determined by who is righ