Being honest with yourself can be the hardest thing for sure. It takes breaking down walls that weren’t even in view before. Some internalized beliefs you could subconsciously hold about yourself. The market strips the veil away violently. Mark Douglas covers this topic very nicely in his book.
Benefits of index beta. Rising tide lifts all boats. What's hilarious is the vast, vast majority of those who are up are still underperforming index.
Yeah and it probably comes back to psychology. It's more exciting jumping from stock to stock and losing money than only trading QQQ and being driven mad with boredom but getting rich.
It's just too much temptation, gold stock breakout, crypto, uranium, technology stocks, speccy stocks with an exciting story, new biotechnology inventions, stocks which supply the war machine like drones, lithium battery stocks...... Now it's easy in a way making money, but it's difficult keeping the money by getting out in time when these high flyers crash, and they crash fast. The more stocks you hold, the more complex to manage the exits if you are a one man band trader.
Funny how the real world never behaves like the book. For me trading was not an uphill battle, more like a fake mountain that I had to abandon completely after 10 years of wasted effort. And for me, The Answer was 100% psychological. So simple I never believed it! "Profits take care of themselves, but losses never do"
You're in for a rough road if you use trading as a mesure of your self worth; I'd take up a skills trade instead. Unless you're building a sophisticated algo that you can reliably profit from, trading is a gambler's guessing game despite all the so called predictive tools available out there. 90% failure rate is proof. I always say... If you can't beat your favorite mutual fund, then put your money with them. If you do much better, learn to say stop and do something else with your days/weeks/months before the end of year. You won.
So many varying perspectives just within this short time. It’s eye opening. A lot of different mountains on the horizon of this land called trading. Let’s keep it going!