• Home
  • /
  • Blog
  • /
  • Your Money and Financial Freedom Guide: Personality Traits of Successful Investors

Your Money and Financial Freedom Guide: Personality Traits of Successful Investors

Written By Millen Livis


Become an Educated Investor

Invest in areas that you have some level of expertise in or be willing to educate yourself. You can subscribe to investment newsletters, read books on investing or attend investment seminars.

If you choose to delegate growing your wealth to a financial planner or an investment advisor, research their suggestions and their track record before signing up to do business with them. Make sure that advisors are not compensated based on the amount of money you invest with them (not commission-based.)

ALWAYS REMEMBER THIS: Nobody cares about YOUR MONEY more than you do, therefore, exercise extreme caution if you outsource managing your money to others.

Don’t Let a Small Loss Become a Huge One

You must exercise utmost discipline with your investments on the stock market because it is extremely difficult to recover your portfolio from a big loss. Here is a market portfolio loss/recovery forecast:

  • If you lose 10 percent, you need an 11 percent gain to get back to ‘square one’
  • If you lose 50 percent, you need a 100 percent gain just to get you back to where you started

You may think it’s very unlikely to lose so much on the stock market…and I say it is highly probable and, in fact, happens all the time. Unfortunately, inexperienced investors get frozen when they experience high losses of value and do nothing with the hope to at least recover their losses. Most of the time, this waiting strategy leads to an even more desperate situation. You don’t want this to happen to you!

Experienced investors know that both, the buy and sell decisions are equally important. However, most individual investors are consumed only by decisions about what and when to buy and almost never think about when to sell. Lack of an exit strategy leaves a big gap in successful investing and often leads to losing money on even initially good investments.

You can set a mental sell stop for your investment and execute it when your position hits this price or enter it explicitly on your brokerage account as a stop limit or a trailing stop. The latter allows your investment to rise but activates a sell order if the position falls by a pre-set amount or percentage. This discipline is yet another form of risk management.

As John Maynard Keynes famously noted: “The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” I suggest that you use limit stops or, better yet, 15 to 25 percent trailing stops on ALL your portfolio positions and apply these stops as soon as you execute your buy order. This will limit your losses and preserve your capital, which is the most important thing in investment.

Cool Attitude Factor

It is quite common for novice investors to get emotionally attached to a particular investment and get completely frozen and desperate when a promising investment starts melting away. That is why a cool attitude factor—your temperament—is so essential for successful investing. A high level of stress associated with investments is a sign of an amateur or a greedy attitude.

A poor investor has a “how much can I make on this and how fast?” attitude. A good investor contemplates what needs to be done to minimize losses to pre-set minimums in case the promise of a particular investment doesn’t actualize/materialize. Having a disciplined and rational approach instead of a greedy and emotional one with all your investments is absolutely essential to achieving success in investing.

Many times it is smarter to do nothing. Often, just a few wise decisions over time add up to great wealth. Of course, you have to know when to act and with how much.

Read more on this subject next week…

To Your Wealth, Health and Happiness,

About the Author

Millen is a Wealth architect and Financial Independence Coach, entrepreneur, and a bestselling author. Being a Possibilities' Catalyst, she uses her intuition, business, and investment expertise to support entrepreneurial women (like you) who want to master their money, live their purpose achieve financial prosperity and freedom. With her physics and business education, corporate and entrepreneurial experience, money management know-how, mindfulness practices and transformational coaching skills, Millen has a unique ability to guide and support clients in achieving extraordinary success in their lives.

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}