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Any professional trader, whether they realize it or not, shares many traits and behaviors with the ‘King of the jungle’. A lion in the wild provides us with an excellent metaphor to help us understand how to behave in the market.
Lions are known as the ‘Kings’ of the jungle for some very good reasons; they are strategic, confident yet patient, relentless yet intelligent and highly-skilled. Lions are finely tuned hunting machines that nature has perfected over millions of years.
Let’s find out how you can become the ‘King of the market’ by learning to ‘hunt’ trades like a lion…
Be relentless
Lions are relentless. They are determined to catch their prey and they don’t give up at the first hint of adversity.
As a trader, you need to be relentless in regards to your trading approach. You cannot get discouraged after a losing trade or two, that is not the mindset of a winning trader. Also, you cannot get discouraged because trading ‘seems hard’ or there’s ‘a lot to learn’. If you really want to free yourself from the ‘chains’ of the slavery that is modern-day society, i.e. jobs and ‘working’, then you have to have a relentless, unwavering commitment to learning to trade properly because successful trading is really the only way to free one’s self from those chains.
Be adaptable
Lions are adaptable. They will go after whatever prey is most available to them; gazelles, impala, zebras, even elephants and hippos (humans sometimes too). They will not starve to death just because the prey they are most accustomed to has moved out. Lions will find new prey or they will move to where there’s more prey.
As a trader, you need to be able to adapt to changing market conditions. Markets don’t always trend perfectly and they are constantly changing. If you are not using a trading strategy that allows you to find high-probability trade signals in any market condition (like price action), you are not going to survive very long.
Trade with strategy and skill
The strategy and skill with which a pride of lions’ hunt, is truly an amazing thing to watch. They learn hunting skills as cubs and they practice and perfect those skills and strategies over time. Lions do not take a random ‘gamblers’ approach to the way they hunt, because their survival depends on it.
Similarly, you cannot gamble your money in the market if you hope to become a profitable trader. A professional trader’s survival depends on his or her trading, so taking a strategic and skilled approach to their trading is essential. Lions and professional traders both have strategies that they execute consistently, and you need to do the same if you hope to make money trading.
Focus on the ‘easy’ trades
Part of a lion’s hunting strategy is to single out the easiest prey to secure. Lions go after the most obvious prey; the sick, old or very young (weakest). The most obvious prey is the highest-probability for a lion, just like the most obvious price action signals are the highest-probability for a trader.
As a price action trader, you can learn to find the ‘easy’ trades by mastering one trade pattern at a time and then recognizing when that pattern is present in the market. You obviously cannot go after the ‘easy’ trades if you don’t know what they look like and how they are different than random market ‘noise’, which is why you need to first LEARN how to spot those ‘easy’ trades.
Conserve your trading capital
Why do lions lay around and sleep so much? It’s not because they’re lazy. It’s because they are conserving their energy so that the next time they see an ‘easy’ prey come around, they have a good chance of catching it. Lions don’t run after every gazelle or zebra they see; they save their energy for the highest-probability catches.
Running after every potential prey a Lion sees would quickly yield nothing, and would probably have long since led to their extinction as a species. Lions have survived and thrived for so long, because they go after the easy prey, amongst other reasons.
As a trader, we can view the ‘strong prey’ as the low-probability trades that are not worth risking money, while the ‘weak prey’ are the high-probability / obvious trades you need to ‘run’ hard at.
A lion also will not waste energy unnecessarily; if they sense a prey is getting away they will let it go and regroup. Don’t take huge losses as a trader; plan out your exit beforehand and don’t get emotionally attached to any one trade, you need to accept that you will have losses and move on quickly after having one.
Lions make sure to secure their prey
Lions do not let their prey get away once they tackle it. They make sure to subdue the prey by jumping on it / biting its neck. They eat everything and vigorously defend it from scavengers like hyenas.
You must defend your profits from other traders and from the market. You can do this by making sure you take logical profits when they are available. For example, if you see a very solid / key level that is near a 2R profit on your trade, you should place your profit target just before that level. If you don’t, the market will probably bounce at that level and start moving against you…. you gave up that profit.
You can also secure profits by not over-trading or taking low-probability trades. Don’t give your profits back to the market right after you secure them. Keep them and then go back to waiting patiently for another ‘easy prey’ trade. Go take a nap and rest, like a lion, just don’t give your profits back to the market from a stupid trade.
Develop your sense of risk / reward
Lions have a built in sense of risk reward. They don’t go on a hunt unless they feel confident they will get a meal as a result of their efforts. They don’t take the risk of expending energy on the very hard to kill prey, instead they expend it on the easy prey, which may mean waiting for it to come along for longer than they may like (they’re hungry, but they know when to strike and when not to).
Similarly, you have to avoid taking unnecessary risks in the market by not going after non-signals, etc. Preserve your energy / money for obvious trade signals so that you can make the most out of them when they arise. Wait patiently for the easy and obvious trades and then go in hard when you spot them, like a pack of lions running after its chosen / easy prey.
Develop your trading instincts
Lions have excellent instincts and gut feel about whether to pursue a certain prey or not. This is something they were partially born with and partially learned as a cub, from their mothers mostly.
As humans, we are all born with slightly different abilities and talents that can contribute to our trading skill or work against it. Fortunately for us, we can learn from others and develop the ability to trade successfully even if we weren’t born with a natural knack for it.
For a trader, the lion is an excellent metaphor for how we should behave in the market. Like a lion, you need to be strategic in your trading approach, patient, disciplined, confident and protective of your trading capital.
The success and longevity of lions, as well as their place as the ‘king of the jungle’, is the result of their superior hunting abilities based on all of the points discussed above. Similarly, if you want to be a consistently profitable trader, you must have a strategy and an approach to your ‘hunting’ in the market. You can learn about the strategies and the approach that I use to ‘hunt’ for high-probability price action trades by taking my trading course and joining my members’ area.
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