Why Setting Trading And Investing Goals Can Improve Your Trading/Investing Performance

Posted on November 24, 2009
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What’s the best way to go about setting your trading or investing goals? Well, as with most goal setting in your life it involves two important elements: perceived difficulty, and how specific you are in stating your goal. These two elements play an important part in attaining your goals.

If you set yourself a trading/investing goal which is difficult and specific you are more likely to heighten your performance to attain your goal.

Let’s look at a trading example. Let’s say our trading goal is to earn $50,000 next year from our trading activity. That’s good but $51,600 will likely create better performance because the brain perceives it as more specific.

A lot of people think you should set easy goals. Not so. The best goals are difficult goals that are specific. Goals should be difficult and specific. So if you believe that your trading goal of $51,600 is easily achievable then raise it to a level that you believe will be more challenging, perhaps $72,400.

But your goal has to be realistic to be achievable. You need to believe your goal is attainable through your past experience, knowledge, training and/or skills that you can make it happen. So to perform against your goal make it realistic.

If you believe that achieving your goal is important you will be more committed to making it happen. If you can measure how you are progressing towards your goal, then you can measure how well you are performing. This serve to strengthen your commitment to attaining your goal and progress results.

You can measure your progress against your trading/investing goal simply by keeping a running tally of your earnings year to date. So when you are half way through the year and have an earning tally of $38,100 from your goal of $72,400 you know you are on track as you are over half way there.

Often when we start off in trading/investing we do not set goals. Often we’re just happy to see ourselves make some money. This unfortunately is not specific or difficult – it is not going to challenge or focus your performance.

Start by setting a difficult, specific, and realistic trading/investing goal and start measuring your progress. But make sure you understand why you want to achieve your goal; you need to know why it is important for you to achieve your goal.

Kevin Hogan talks about “the least acceptable result” in his book “The Psychology of Persuasion”. Your least acceptable result is often the true goal that people achieve from any activity – what is your trading/investing least acceptable result. Make your least acceptable result your goal and watch your trading/investing performance results.

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