Trading Rules, to follow, or not to follow?

Aloha traders, this is my final day writing and trading from the beautiful city Emerald City of Seattle, WA before I return to Hawaii from vacation.

I wanted to post an entry focused on personal trading rules. This comes to mind as an important topic for several reasons, but most recently because of the trading rule that I broke yesterday, causing me to loose focus and in the end, money. After all, trading is ultimately about coming away from the experience with hopefully more money that we started with, but also a healthy frame of mind and outlook on life. Trading is not the be all, end all that many traders seem to equate it to, however it is very difficult to not work from this point of view if each and every tick, and each and every dollar that goes in and out of your account creates an emotional response within your mind and body.

I have always had a general rule, among all the others that I use for daily trading activities, that essentially there should never be any reason to trade while connected to the market via "wireless internet". Why? Well, there are many different reasons, but the one that matters most to me is money management. The greatest influence upon my daily money management is the flow of the market, as it should be, however the potential for a loss of signal while trading makes this virtually impossible to trust in the fashion necessary in order to trade objectively.

That said, it must be noted that after breaking this rule and paying for it yesterday, the lesson I was able to reinforce is greater than the cost to my account(well within my allowed loss limit), as it should be because lessons like this are the ones that help a trader become consistent over the long haul. Even more ironic, had I been using a direct connection, I would have actually had a fairly nice profit on the day, yet when I went to close my position the internet connection immediately died(of course), and by the time it was good to go, I had missed the extremely delicate exit that I had required. All in all, a great lesson to have reinforced.