Yeah, i’m guilty of impatience and over-trade. But i’m reforming now.
First, i learnt to sell at a loss. Only then i was able to slowly learn to be patient.
I dunno about everyone else, but i find being patience is far more difficult to cultivate than coping with losing money.
Sometimes, i found myself in a twisted delight (with an evil grin and rubbing my hands) when i sell stock at a loss because those cash will be free up for my next (hopefully winning) trade.

Life’s funny because if you’re a trader, you need patience even though trader deals with short time-frame.
Long term investor deals with long time-frame and yet requires little patience.
Remind me that young people like to drive fast even though they have a lot of time left while old people drive slow even though they don’t have much time left. Shouldn’t old people drive fast and young people driver slow?

Remember, the stock market is not an ATM in which you can steadily & consistently extract money from on a daily basis. Most of my profits come in streaks lasting days or week, followed by a lull while the market or the sectors/stocks that I am trading consolidate or aren’t set up in clearly bullish or bearish posture. Good things come to those that wait & from personal experience, I can say that one of the most detrimental habits that I had in my early years of trading was the urge to ABT (Always-Be-Trading).
The urge to over-trade or always be in the market is especially strong after a big winning streak, such as the market presented to a lot of traders over the past few months. In my early years of trading full-time, I found that my biggest draw-downs usually came on the heels of my biggest winning streaks. The reasoning was two-fold: 1) Over-confidence and 2) over-sized positions (largely a function of the former). Now, after a big run, if my read on the market isn’t very strong, I’ll reduce both my position size & overall trading activity as well as becoming extra-selective on the trades that I do take.

I have a saying that I made up years ago which says: “While patience is a virtue in life, it is an absolute requirement in trading.”

Nice spot. There does seem to be a potential cup & handle formation on the SPY & QQQ 60-minute time frames. We’ll most likely have to wait until next week to see if it plays out but certainly worth monitoring.

Agreed and I hate being like this. I like direction and volatility and I have none.

Great point. Pullbacks after a fairly strong advance (QQQ has rallied 6% in just over 6 trading sessions) are healthy & necessary to work off near-term overbought conditions as well as clear out some of the increasing bullishness plus suck in some more shorts to provide fuel (in the form of short-covering) for the next leg up, assuming that the market are headed higher, of course.

I’m eye-ing it also.