If you’ve been trading long enough, you’ve no doubt met newbie Christians who are in the stock market. They’ve got this twisted habit of praying and hoping when they are down in a position.

A trader buddy of mine comes to mind.

He bought E-Trade a couple of weeks ago. A week later, he was up in E-Trade about 5%. He wanted bigger gains so he held on. The stock fell 15% in one day on him. It happened in after hours trading due to a bad press release.

I asked him what he was going to do now. He said he was going to pray/hope for a bounce at market open in order to exit.

I told him he needed to exit immediately. I warned him that a lot of traders were in the exact same sinking boat that he was: being trapped in the stock because they don’t trade in the after hours market. Therefore, the stock was likely to drop further in the morning.

Did he listen? Of course not. My friend has deep seeded ego issues.

I even got in his face and said, “Look! Save the praying and hoping for Church on Sundays. This is the stock market. You need to be striving to think as clearly as possible about the reality of the situation at any given point in time. Not some fantasy notion of how you are going to control reality because you think you have a better relationship with God than everybody else. If you want to pray, go be a preacher or something. If you want to trade, be a trader.”

He still didn’t listen at market open. E-Trade fell another 25% the next day.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Christians suck as stock traders. The

temptation is too great for them to fall back into the “praying” and “hoping” trap. The idea is to never put yourself into a position that you have to “pray” or “hope” that your stock is going to go higher in the first place. If your break with reality is so great that you wake up and find yourself praying that your stock is going to go higher, that is a key signal that you should sell and take a loss as quickly as possible.

It’s funny how silly Christian traders are. If you really want to have fun with a Christian trader, tell him, “The Bible says, ‘Money is the root of all evil.’ So if God hates money so much so that He calls it the “root of all evil”, then why would He help you make more of it? In fact, wouldn’t God view you as evil for desiring evil so much that you would ask Him to help you in the stock market?”

Bottom line. Divine intervention will never come. Praying to God is a wasted exercise. Just get out!