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38 HOW TO MAKE MONEY IN STOCKS SUCCESS STORIES

shouldn’t have because she was “so sure the market was going to continue to
go higher.” Because of this overly optimistic attitude, Jeannie gave back some
very nice gains made in an uptrending market by not going to cash when the
market began to correct. Since the vast majority of stocks move up or down
with the general market, it’s critical to pay attention to this.
Jeannie realized that a lack of discipline was the problem and decided
that a remedy would be to “pay a huge amount of attention to the overall
market direction, because this will determine your level of success.” Now
Jeannie makes sure to monitor the overall trend before making any invest-
ing decisions.

Fear

Fear of losing money is quite common in stock investing, particularly if
someone is new to investing. When Brian Gonzales was relatively new to
investing, he would nervously watch stocks that he owned throughout the
trading day, because he was afraid they would go down and he’d lose money.
When his IBD Meetup Development colleague Jason D’Amore was begin-
ning to invest, he too admitted to “being very tentative about losing gains
that I made. I sold a couple of positions very quickly after the stock went
down a few percentage points, which ended up being too soon, because I
was afraid of losing money.”
To alleviate their fears and remove any possible emotional trading, they both
set predetermined sell triggers through their brokerage accounts, which would
be 4 to 5% below their original buy points on any stocks that they owned. By
placing the trade triggers, their losses would be small if a stock purchase that
they made didn’t work out. It also meant they didn’t have to watch their stocks
anxiously during market hours. The key thing that both of them have learned
is the importance of having a set of rules and staying true to them. Brian says,
“Rules keep me grounded and help remove the fear and uncertainty.” He has
watched friends invest without any rules or system and has seen them lose
large amounts of money in the market as a result. Brian says, “The ‘throw a dart
at a stock and hope it goes up’ method of investing can be very dangerous.”

Greed

Gennady Kupershteyn had been trading stocks since college in the early
1990s when, at the tender age of 18, he was given the nickname “Stock