Focus on, enjoy and love the execution process and outcomes will be positive; focus on the outcomes and the opposite will happen; they will be negative over a large sample of trades. This is yet another trading paradox, the degree to which you focus on outcomes will be the degree to which you will be unsuccessful in the market.
Focusing on outcomes will cause trainee traders to miss trades, chase trades that shouldn’t be done, exit early, enter late and risk positions that are too large or too small. These are all mistakes.
Mistakes are caused by fearing the “wrong” outcome. Our fear of a “wrong” outcome is greater than our fear of a “right” outcome. I use inverted commas because our societal paradigm is programmed to define wrong as a loss outcome and right as a winning outcome whereas an outcome is what it is, just an outcome. Most of the time outcomes are caused by variables that are out of our control but we make the situation worse by making mistakes with the variables over which we do have control.
When you execute a process according to its defined routines then all outcomes are “right” and there are no mistakes. Therefore, surrender the outcomes to whatever they will be and put your focus into your actual defined process of trading. Executing a process as it should be executed is easier to achieve when you have done your preparation and have defined a process based around a statistical edge that you trust.
In a nutshell, focusing on outcomes causes inconsistency and erratic actions which result in poor outcomes that cause frustration, anger, denial and dishonesty (with yourself and everyone around you) about performance which can spiral out of control.