Just curious, what can lead to big success in trading? Innate skills, discipline, a wealth of experience, analysts' forecasts, special literature, some tricks or it's just a matter of chance?
Knowledge, and a strong motivation to spend the equivalence of a bachelors degree hours wise or more on the craft. Understand your market (for me its futures)Reading all the books on trading. Take the knowledge, apply it to the chart. Mark where all the books say you should be entering, watch price bust through everyone's stops on this "obvious' entry, and you be the liquidity of 'their stops'. Repeat this over and over and over. Understand that for you to succeed, somebody else has to fail. So study where they fail, and do the reverse.
innate skills: obviously. discipline: yes, but you also need to be flexible and open-minded. experience: yes. analysts forecasts: that's a joke. special literature: also, somewhat a joke. chance: not in the long run. for long run success, you need genuine talent and intuition. ...it's basically just a matter of grinding it day in, day out...with your special edge or skill.
I would like to add...analytical ability and persistence. Analytical ability: detecting flaws, pattern recognition in numbers or charts, pattern recognition of ONE'S OWN BEHAVIOR, developing a structured plan. Everyone will have various degrees of analytical ability...the more the better...in my opinion! Persistence: developing intuition, developing discipline including SELF RESTRAINT. Persistence may increase analytical ability as well. Persistence demands experience!
Perseverance, innate knowledge you will overcome, knowledge is ongoing, being able to adapt, knowing when to be smart enough to know when to be dumb, knowing all the books are one chapter short(difference between 95% who lose and 5% who are profitable), knowing the extra chapter is gained through losses if going at it alone, learning well where 95% will get in and don't get in there, coat tailing Commercials. It is a hundred little things you have to either born into you, learned through childhood, gained from losing, reading right books, but other half is huge hours of doing. It is like learning to juggle or tying cherry stem into a knot in your mouth, more time you put into it, eventually you learn tricks or steps to become profitable and you become faster at recognizing how to repeat. Cherry stem trick has paid for many free drinks and dinners.
My guess is that there are about a half-dozen approaches to skinning the market's cat. One is Buffett's way... have enough information and the ability to distill it down to the conclusion, "this company's stock is less than it should be". Experience and discipline are always important.