Keep your emotions out of it!

This might correlate with some of my previous posts, but the title pretty much somes it up. A big problem investors face is their emotions, especially for new/young investors, it is easy to get sucked into all the ups and downs of the market.  

Emotions are normal, it's something we all have as humans, but if your emotions control you then your investing will suffer. This is not necessarily possible for everyone, but it is possible to manage this as best as possible. The easiest way to control your emotions is to do your research and analysis and proving that the investment your making is a good one, after that you ride the wave and pull out when your happy with the gains.

If you are unable to control your emotions allow someone else to control it for you, ETFs are a great way to ensure that someone with experience looks afet your investments.

How to control you emotions in other ways.

Stop loss

Most brokers that allow trading will have the option of putting in a stop loss, a stop loss is a lower limit that you put on your investment. This allows your investment to reduce in value but only up and till a certain amount. This is where your risk assesment comes in, how much are you willing to lose? Once you've established this you can put a stop loss in place.

Value of the stock

This is linked to a few things such as P/E ratio, Intrinsic Value and the Valuation indicated by other analists. These Values allow you to determine whether the stock is over-or-undervalued, thus allowing you to ride the wave with ease and not panic.

News

News isn't always great, because sometimes it does spread fear. The best you can do when reading or listening to news, is consume news that report what caused the changes, rather than news that tell you how to react, or how others are reacting. This is crucial in order to asses what is going on and decide the best way forward for you.

Emotions under control

Once you've learned how to control these emotions of yours, life will become a lot easier, so the sooner you understand the cause of it the better, and the sooner you learn to trust your judgement the better.