You can learn features — bits of knowledge — from books, but the mind-set that makes that knowledge into living skill can be learned only by practice and apprenticeship. What will do it is (a) reading strategies and (b) writing strategies and putting them at work. The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again. Apprenticeship is as much theory as practice. Keep it well balanced. Contextualize then Practice. Trading is a craft. Learn the skills by doing. But a science as well. Test each & every hypothesis.
You should stay away from self professed professional traders that try to impress on social media and have fake testimonials on their websites. Welcome to the shark infested waters of trading education. Check out TradingSchools.org to see how many charlatans there are out there.
Sure - disastrous, of course, but you've learned that it was a mistake, and that's the main thing. There's a whole lot more to "a trading system" than just entry/exit requirements. But well done for not thinking of it as just "entry requirements", as many people do. Here are three books which will help you to learn how develop a trading system, and what successful ones are based on. I recommend all three, and advise you not to trade with real money until you've read and understand all three ... Trade Your Way to Financial Freedom - Van K. Tharp (a great book in spite of its horrible and suspicious title!) Beyond Technical Analysis - Tushar S. Chande Profitability and Systematic Trading - Michael Harris (this one covers the necessary knowledge of trading statistics and probability, without which - from whatever source you learn them - it won't be possible to trade profitably). Don't imagine that you can somehow replace the education necessary from the contents of those three books with internet "information". You can't, because you don't have enough experience to know what's reliable, and to distinguish between fact and opinion and between information and misinformation. There's a real learning-curve. Success-rates are low to very-low. It's when people look for short cuts, or naively imagine that they can make money steadily simply by "copying something that just 'works'," that a wheel normally comes off. When you have little-to-no experience, yourself, it’s really terribly difficult to judge who’s a suitable mentor. Be very careful with people selling mentoring services. It’s easier for people to make money that way than by trading themselves. Make sure that anyone mentoring you is trading successfully himself. Ask to see independently corroborated evidence of that. Ask to speak, yourself, with at least two other people who have used the mentoring service and ask them how they benefited from it. Don’t depend on "prepared email/website testimonials". Don’t be fobbed off by “lack of availability of former customers to talk with”. If anyone selling “mentoring” tries to suggest or imply that that’s a demanding or unreasonable request, run. There are overwhelmingly more charlatans and scammers about than genuine mentors. Be suspicious of everyone. Good luck!
Amen. Tradingschools.org has exposed many scumbags who make Al Brooks look like a holy saint in comparison.
@Xela ... LOTS of good info here. I'm taking a trip to Barnes & Noble in about an hour and I'll be sure to pick up those books, as well as 2 others suggested earlier. The help is greatly appreciated.
I'm pretty sure that if I had a mentor, I would've progressed much more quickly, maybe enough to start making some stable money. However, getting such a mentor that really hits you, in any activity be it spiritual or financial, is very very rare. Even if you find such a mentor, the time might be limited and your relationships and needs might change over time. What do you have to offer your mentor? In the end, you are left on your own and need to dispell your own illusions, as well as others' illusions that have been imposed upon you. So even though your request might be sincere, life is such that what you're offered, may be different than what you ask. This doesn't mean you should stop asking. You need to always remain open to all possibilities, not just the one or two you have in your mind - more of a limitation than help. There are as many trading plans, or lack of them, as there are traders. I often find what works for others, doesn't 100% resonate with me, though I get ideas I can use and build upon. Reading posts from experienced people on this forum has been one of rare gold nuggets available online. Usually not from a purely technical perspective, but from experience and attitude perspectives. However, you do need the hours and pain to be able to use such for your own trading path. Advanced concepts are usually dangerous/useless to the mind not ready to receive them. Trading intra-day, access to decades of "accurate" historical data, backtesting, out-of-sample testing, AB-testing, multi-market trading, auto-trading, etc. are really advanced concepts with implementations hard to come by. Too often, snake oil is sold for "the value of your next trade" (aka loss). Most people lie to themselves and project unto others, or they just lie for money and attention. Few people have used years/decades of their lives to get there, and when/if something works, will not see the point in selling their little edges for peanuts, even if such edge is in reality imaginary! Nobody got all the boxes checked and successful people often have contradictory differences of opinion what really works and not. Often systems need to adapt as well, so there's a need to know how to successfully improve all the time, something often anti-taught in most schools and organizations! This is a game of margins, of beating the crowd. Statistically, we're part of the crowd by default. Thus doing the right decisions every day is way tougher than it looks. It requires to know when to go against the crowd and when to follow the herd. Can't say I've found the holy grail, but can at the same time say that investing/trading is probably way easier than we make it. Just need to scrap all the false notions and pride, and bet when everything's failing. This is of course emotionally and statistically a tough sell - except in hindsight the one or two times it really did succeed.. My path is mostly technical, but may be open to use some fundamental later if it is an improvement. I know I should keep losses small, but that really seems not to work for me in the markets available. So may need to find ways that works better. By allowing larger swings, you can have both high reward% and high winrate%, but need to know position sizing so as not to bet too much absolute capital. Seems like a simple foundation now, though not the great money making machine of my dreams. So keep looking and keep options open. Because in the end, you're the one left pulling the triggers, having to accept full responsibility. In trading you must know when to buy, when to sell, by how much, at all times. Simple rules - like chess, but unpredictable - unlike chess. Seems the market works best when most people lose. So unlike chess, most people are left unable to fend for themselves. Ie. there's no "justice" or guaranteed rewards for "being right". In the end, price can totally screw with all our pretty and advanced analysis, and then, what then?