How To Protect You From Yourself

Many traders essentially have a "gambling problem". The emotion lures them tin to be "reactionary" traders instead of "anticipatory". We talked about ways you can cure this to some extent in the post titled "The Enemy of Your Trading and Antidote". Thus, they becomes easily victim to their emotions and current thought processes rather than looking objectively at the data and action.

But some people just can not help themselves once they are in that mood of buying. They must buy.

So there are still a few solutions.
1)"CD and/or Bond Ladder" Airelon from nononsense trading gets into this in his video series. Basically once a month you have money go IN to a 1yr bond or CD. Rising rates shouldn't matter much since you are only putting small amounts each month. This helps you because if you are at risk of putting capital to work you can't (mostly) since it's locked up, but you still will keep that cash relatively liquid and have capital coming in every month at the end of a year. The problem is, the worse your problem, the more you should put into the bond ladder/cd ladder but the less likely you are going to want to.
2)Using Currency ETFs. These still provide risk, but going long the ETF rather than options on the ETF and locking it up helps. Typically you are looking for something you expect to move either independent of the market (zero correlation) or sometimes opposite of the market (slightly negative correlation).
3)Using LEAP options and adding time - This can help as opposed to short dated contracts because you can tie more money up safely for longer periods of time with smaller drawdowns per trade than shorter term options. If the option goes against you, it still will have time potential to preserve capital. The key is not taking the $2,000 you would normally use on stocks and put them all into options, but instead look at the 150 shares you would normally buy and put it into 1 or 2 contracts and be sure you have a lot of excess cash, maybe have the occasional put option as a hedge, diversify over multiple timeframes and utelize currency and commodity and country ETF options to provide low correlation plays so you aren't too levered to the movements of the market over any particular period of time.
4)Going long ETFs for the long term and resolving not to touch it. This doesn't always work, but can to some degree. Being long SPY and long GLD and long UUP and LONG TLT for example helps. For many people, they are less tempted to sell something they own than they are to buy when they have the cash to spend. In other words, use capital on various ETFs on longer term trade/investments so you aren't tempted to use that capital towards leveraged option plays over short periods of time
5)Commission free trading-This requires you to hold it 30 days and helps you keep more of money if you do want to trade everytime you are allowed.
6)Cash in other accounts. Excess cash.
7)start with small amount in account and have incremental program of adding to the account to help you a bit with the drawdowns.
8)Mathimatical understanding of what's correct
9)Set alerts and stop and limit orders and trailing stop orders so that you can "set and forget" rather than be forced to check on the prices of everything you own (more on trading automatically) later.

10)Income -You can consider corporate bonds CORP, high yield corporate HYG, or high yield equities via preferred shares PFF,PSK. Or perhaps US treasury bonds TLT,SHY. Or emerging market bonds from corporate CEMB to soverign debt bonds PCY. The key is you want something with a yield that you can hold and add to or reduce according to allocation only, but never sell completely. Then simply continue to collect the dividend. In conjunction with dividend paying investments, CD and Bond ladders, and earned income from a job or your own freelance and/or contracting and/or second job or business will allow you to keep adding money to your account.

11)More Income- Actual longer term investments are great because it ties up capital and keeps it safe (relatively speaking). The reason is, if you put 100% at risk but keep the investment with the potential to make 10 times your starting investment over potentially 10+years, you are giving yourself a much better reward to risk ratio, and your probability of losing it all over that length of time is very slim if you take the time to make an intelligent decision and buy the right kind of company. Add in a dividend and reinvest that dividend at least for the first few years initially before you turn off the DRIP program or stop reinvesting your dividends and it will grow in size and be able to pay even more dividends as the company grows as well (potentially). That means more income at some point. 12)Even more Income - When the Volatility gets high, say above 20... you may wish to consider a strategy of selling puts. Sell a put in order to get long the stock. If the stock doesn't go lower, you can sell it again and repeat. Each time you do, you collect the entire premium. Once you are long it, and even with some positions you are long, you may OCCASIONALLY sell a covered call that is well out of the money. I have not really learned the best covered call strategy and right now I don't really like the strategy too much.

13)Seek Help! - Depending on severity of the problem, you may want to seek actual help in gambling rehab. There are people out there that do not realize the aspect of risk and emotional compulsions to trade that exist. There are gamblers anonymous groups that you could lookup no problem. But it's a lot easier to erase losses by speculation if you have a profitable strategy but find yourself risking too much if you instead allocate enough of that "risk" into things that will generate income and return that capital back to you in the future. If you lose 20% of your portfolio it takes a 25% gain to get back to even. But if you have 20% of the capital you lost return to you... Even though you will have to still replace the 20% gain through actual gains in the market, you won't need a disproportionally larger gain to make up for a smaller loss. Even if you can replace your biggest drawdowns with half the amount of capital, you go from needing an extra 5% in the instance of a 20% drawdown, to only an extra 1% to compensate for losses (10% loss requires only a 11% gain to get back to even.)

14)Seek More Help - Aside from seeking gamblers anonymous it's possible you don't need that kind of help. Instead, it's possible you may just need a mentor or coach who can accelerate your learning process and figure out what it is you are doing wrong.