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8
Trading Perfection or Trading Excellence?
4The conscious or unconscious desire to be the perfect trader pervades the live trading floors and electronic networks of the financial marketplace. Institutional and independent money managers want to be the best, to have the top performing fund in their sector. And, of course, individual online investors want every trade to make a profit. The whole financial world speaks a market language of ''winners" and "losers." Everyone wants to make a bet on the winning stocksfor the day, the month, the quarter, and the year.
The fear of making mistakes, losing money, and feeling incompetent as traders holds back many from taking the assertive steps necessary toward gaining greater knowledge and self-control in managing their money that we focused on in the last chapter. These fears stop significant numbers of those who already surf the Internet from learning how to extend their online experience to stock trading. Once they have become initiated into the world of online trading, these same fears hold them back from becoming more passionate and sophisticated investors.
As mentioned in the preface, one of the purposes of this book is to help online investors gain more of the psychological knowledge they need to successfully manage their own accounts. One piece of this knowledge is confronting this desire to be perfect. This desire is so deeply ingrained in our culture and our psyches that some psychologists believe it is even genetically programmed as one of the

 
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