Grow Up! (Part 2)

Today I continue with my response to a forum post from a disgruntled student of options trading:

> Disclaimer: I mean no offense here, JD, but I do hope you
> learn something.
>
> I believe your post is inappropriate. Your post does nothing
> less than blame X for losing money. As a student, you should
> only be doing paper trades for now and paper losses do not
> justify the harsh tone of your post. If this were a real
> trade then you deserve the consequences because you should
> not yet be trading real money! That has been repeated over
> and over and over around here. If you are a graduate of this
> program and do not know the real risk of collars then you
> clearly didn’t put much effort into learning the material
> and/or listening to lectures.
>
> Ultimately, if you’re going to be a successful trader then
> you need to take responsibility for yourself. You will have
> winning trades and you will have losing trades. The losing
> trades are not the market’s fault, not X’s fault, not a
> coach’s fault: they are your fault and your fault alone.
>
> Understand the responsibility and own it. If you traded
> too large and suffered a loss too great for you to bear
> then learn the lesson and vow to do better next time
> so it doesn’t happen again.
>
> In trader psychology terms, grow up JD.

That pretty much says it all.

I’ll save one more thought on this matter for the next post.