Don't take my word for it...

In his famous Market Wizards interview, trend following trader Richard Dennis stated the following:

"I always say that you could publish my trading rules in the newspaper and no one would follow them. The key is consistency and discipline. Almost anybody can make up a list of rules that are 80% as good as what we taught our people. What they couldn't do is give them the confidence to stick with those rules even when things are going bad."

When you allow yourself to go through that threshold of fully trusting your system rules, you gain a sense of serenity, which comes in very useful when things get volatile, as they did last week. For trend followers, you realise that giving back a portion of your hard earned profits, or getting stopped out of several trades at a loss, is part of the game. You also are able to resist the urge to override the rules that you designed specifically to deal with such occurences.

You also know that, as existing trends end, or at least enter into consolidation phases, new trends will start elsewhere. As one door closes....