Inspirational quotes for traders:

On my linkedin group 'Trader, Trading & Risk Psychology', I have been asking members to submit inspirational quotes. Over the past 2 months I have received a veritable mudslide of quotes from group members. - The list below is a collated list of all quotes received thus far:

(Please note: Where a quote has not been credited to a person or anonymous, I have credited it as 'Courtesy of the the group member who submitted it'.) 

Thank you to all those who have contributed so far.

Planning, Discipline & Patience.

• ‘Predicting rain does n't count; building arks does': Warren Buffett’s Noah Rule.
• "To know and not to do, is not yet to know" – Courtesy of Tom Witters.
• ‘It's easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you're a winner, when you're number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you're not a winner.’ – Vince Lombardi
• ‘After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!’ – Jesse Livermore

Fear

• 'Never let fear of striking out, get in your way': Babe Ruth.

Perspectives

• 'It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,' - Lawrence Peter 'Yoggi' Berra.
• “go as far as you can see, and when you get there , you will see further." -
• anonymous
• ‘Don't worry what others think... They don't do it very often’ – Courtesy of Mark Carstens.
• "A little learning is a dangerous thing, but we must take that risk because a little is as much as our biggest heads can hold." - George Bernard Shaw.
• "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana.
• “Glory is fleeting but obscurity is eternal” – Napoleon
• ‘A long term investment is when I break even.’ – Courtesy of David Wong.
• "There are many truths, but only one reality" – Courtesy of Robin Farrell.
• ‘It's not whether you get knocked down, it's whether you get up.’ – Vince Lombardi.
• 'We would accomplish many more things if we did not think of them as impossible.’ – Vince Lombardi
• "Vision - It reaches beyond the thing that is, into the conception of what can be. Imagination gives you the picture. Vision gives you the impulse to make the picture your own." – Robert Collier.
• "If you're 30 minutes into the game and you don't know who the patsy is, you're the patsy." – Courtesy of Saranjot Dosanjh.
• ‘Price is observable and objective while value is perceived and subjective’. – John Murphy.
• ‘In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.’ – Yogi Berra.
• “As a rule, Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works…. The Failure of great banks… and mercantile firms…are the symptoms incident to the disease, not the disease itself.” – John Stuart Mill (1867).
• ‘You need three bear markets to know what to do. The first nearly wipes you out, the second you learn how to survive and the third you take by the scruff of the neck and enjoy it.’ – Crispin Odey of Odey Asset Management.
• “Never in recorded history, has the supply of capital not overwhelmed the supply of opportunity.” – Joseph Lassiter .
• 'You only live once but if you work it right, once is enough'. – Joe E. Lewis.
• "If you really know whats going on, you don't even have to know whats going on to know whats going on... You can ignore the headlines because you anticipated them months ago" - Michael Steinhardt.
• ‘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.’ - Jesse Livermore.
• "Economic history is a never-ending series of episodes based on falsehoods and lies, not truths. It represents the path to big money. The object is to recognize the trend whose premise is false, ride that trend, and step off before it is discredited." – Soros.

On Losses (and Profits).

• ‘Tradings only real secret is... The best loser is the long-term winner’ - Phantom
• “Trading is a losing game, the best loser is the long-term winner” – Anonymous.
• ‘Losses can either be lost money, or tuition in the school of trading’ - Courtesy of Mark Moskowitz.
• ‘The worst advice I use to get was. - 'No one went broke taking a profit'’. - Courtesy of John Berra.
• "It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually." - Abraham Maslow
• ‘“Learn to like your losses". Why? Because they are small!’ – Courtesy of Stuart A.Brown.
• "One common adage...that is completely wrongheaded is: You can't go broke taking profits. That's precisely how many traders do go broke. While amateurs go broke by taking large losses, professionals go broke by taking small profits." - William Eckhardt.
• “Its not about being right or wrong, rather, its about how much money you make when you’re right and how much you don’t lose when you’re wrong.” – George Soros.
• "The first loss is the best loss." - Jim Rogers.
• "Losers average Losers"...Paul Tudor Jones.
• “You learn nothing from your winners and everything from your losers.” – Courtesy of Jeff Horn.
• ·“To become a Master Trader, you must first be a successful loser.” – Jeff Horn.

Ego

• "Don't be a hero. Don't have an ego. Always question yourself and your ability. Don't ever feel that you are very good. The second you do, you are dead." - Paul Tudor Jones

Personal Responsibility and Self-awarenss

• ‘……you get the results you want. You produce your own success" – Gene Agatstein.
• "I know from experience that nobody can give me a tip or series of tips that will make more money for me than my own judgement." - Jesse Livermore.
• 'There is no holy grail, and there is no magical system. You have to win the battle within you first before you can win with the markets'' – Courtesy of Maria Psarra.
• "If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment." - Marcus Aurelius.
• “If you don't know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out" - Adam Smith, The Money Game.

Personal and Trading advice

• 'Successful trading comes down to this: overcoming your personal psychological barriers and conditioning yourself to produce feelings of self-trust , high self-esteem, unshakable conviction, and confidence which will naturally lead to good judgement and winning trades based on a proven methodology’ – Courtesy of James Buzzard.
• "If everything feels under control, you are not going fast enough" -Mario Andretti, 1978 Formula One World Champion.
• "If you sit by the river long enough, a dead body will sooner or later float down there" – Japanese Proverb.
• 'Buy High, sell Higher AND Sell low, buy back lower', - Anonymous.
• 'The most important rule of trading is to play good defence, not great offence.’ -
• Paul Tudor Jones.
• "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" - John Maynard Keynes.
• “Holding cash is uncomfortable, but not as uncomfortable as doing something stupid.” – Warren Buffet
• "Trade the market, not the money...if you exercise your strategy with discipline, the money will follow." – Courtesy of Umar Ali.
• “If you ACCEPT the risk of the trade and SHARE SIZE appropriately then you should be able to trade in a relaxed and optimum state of mind.” – Courtesy of Tom Willard.
• "The trend is your friend" - – Courtesy of Umar Ali.
• ttitude; Success, Failure, working hard.
• "Mentally write off the work you do, as soon as you have done it" – Courtesy of Robin Farrell.
• "There are old traders and there are bold traders, but there are very few old, bold traders." - Ed Seykota
• “Falling knives have to land somewhere.....” – Courtesy of Aidan Philipson.
• ‘The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work!’- Vince Lombardi.
• “Luck is what you have left over after you give 100 percent” - Langston Coleman.
• ‘Traders (Leaders) are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
• It's easy to have faith in yourself and have discipline when you're a winner, when you're number one. What you got to have is faith and discipline when you're not a winner.’ – Vince Lombardi.
• “I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” - Michael Jordan
• ‘What sets successful traders apart?......Most people think that winning in the markets has something to do with finding the secret formula. The truth is that any common denominator among the traders I interviewed had more to do with attitude than approach’. – Jack Schwager.
• "There is little difference in people, but that little difference makes a big difference. That little difference is attitude. The big difference is whether it is positive or negative." – Robert Collier.‘Ours is not to reason why, ours is but to sell and buy.’ - Courtesy of Mark Moskowitz.
• "Success is the sum of small efforts - repeated day in and day out." – Robert Collier.
• "A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit." - Richard Bach
• “Golf is a game played on a 5 inch Course- the distance between your ears.” – Bobby Jones.
• "...It's all to do with the training: you can do a lot if you're properly trained..." - Queen Elizabeth II.
• "The person who goes farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore." - Dale Carnegie.
• "You are - face it - a bunch of emotions, prejudices, and twitches, and this is all very well as long as you know it. Successful speculators do not necessarily have a complete portrait of themselves, warts and all, in their own minds, but they do have the ability to stop abruptly when their own intuiition and what is happening Out There are suddenly out of kilter. - Adam Smith, The Money Game.
• ‘“Everyday my trading skills are getting better and better". I repeat it like a daily mantra’ – Purportedly attributed to Emile Coue.

Strategy

• "Only movement brings victory" - German Colonel General Heinz Guderian, father of modern armoured warfare.

On Models:

• “Fashion models and financial models bear a similar relationship to the everyday world. Fashion models are idealised concepts of male and female beauty. Financial models are idealised representations of the real world. Neither is real. Models don’t quite work in the way that the real world works. There is celebrity in both worlds. In the end, there is the same inevitable disappointment.” Satyayit Das, author of Traders, Guns & Money
• “All models are wrong, but some are useful” - George Box.

Risk, Money, Liquidity Management.

• "When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.” – Chuck Prince, former CEO at Citibank just before the credit crunch.

On Perfectionism.

• ‘Something that fails to live up to perfection is more despised than something that was never idealized in the first place.’ – Aaron Brown, former risk manager at Morgan Stanley.

Poems:

• 'IF' by Rudyard Kipling.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!