The key is not to get into anything that’s overly complicated. Those are best left to the “pros”, who happen to make their money off the commissions they charge their clients, and not off actual investing. Plus, let’s not forget that the S&P 500 beats the crap out of most of them, year after year. This means that you can opt for a simple strategy involving index funds and still make tons of money in the long run.

One of the biggest reasons why a lot of people lose a lot of money in the stock market is that they let greed dictate their transactions. For example, after careful analysis, they buy into a company at $25 a share, and sold when the share price hit $30, netting them a small profit. However, instead of moving on, they keep an eye on that stock they just sold, noticing that it’s now trading at $40. Now they tell themselves that there’s more money to be made and instead of relying on further analysis, they jump right back in and most of the time the stock drops. Their profit is wiped away and then some.

It can also go the other way around. They short a stock, it goes down, and they earn a tidy profit. They see that it keeps going down, and they try and short it again, but it goes up, and they just lost a lot of money. We can even take this example and see how it makes losses even bigger. A lot of beginner investors refuse to acknowledge that they lost money on a given trade and that it’s time to cut their losses and move on. So they stick with losers.

The right formula if you want to succeed in the stock market is to never get attached to the stocks you’re buying. After all, business is business. Fix yourself target profits, and hedge your trades so you limit your losses. No matter what trade you make, keep in mind that there has to be a reason for making that choice and no matter what happens, let that reason dictate your future behavior.

It’s often said that the stock market is very unpredictable, and it is true. Your best bet is to have a game plan and execute it instead of trying to figure out what the market is doing and reacting to its up and down swings.