Like 95% of posts here are depressing posts about losing money, failing and stuff but are there actually people making decent living being FULL-TIME traders? share your stories and bring some positivity to the forum)
Very few and most of the 1s that say they are I wouldnt trust anyway I'm close ask again in 6 months hopefully less.
You have to change your mindset if you want Success in trading and in life in general; Alot of people are dim-witted sheep and stubborn, close-minded robot heads. (I know I sound cliche and like a motivational speaker...but it's true.) 95% of people in life are basically losers/average. -- You should study and analyze and hang around the 5% of relatively successful people who have their shit together. You could learn a thing or two. ...instead of hanging out below with the sewer crowd. Don't expect anyone with a so-called Holy Grail or skill in trading to literally write it down in some cookbook. The only free information out there is ...free information. That's why it's free...you get what you pay for, or what it's worth. (this is not to say or imply paid stuff is quality -- those are all shit still) Traders trade. authors write. singers sing. etc etc. ...multiple talents rarely span across different fields. trading is like Indiana Jones...it's fraught with peril...along your journey or quest
Yes but ET is well populated with the "I couldn't do it so it can't be done" and the investment adviser crowd.
The below is part of an update I am working on. And no, it is not another book. No more books for me. Just closure before I semi-retire and start spending some of my accumulated profits. We don't live forever. Many thought I was just a product of the 90s where anyone could make money trading. But have made far more since then due to the compound effect. Of course to some I am not a trader since I am not a daytrader. I was a successful part time daytrader and then used those profits to make the real money trading stock mutual funds and now bond funds. Sounds boring I know but each daily penny gain in NAV in my bond funds equates to $2000 in daily profits. And I am hardly buy and hold as i make hundreds of trades annually. More on my actual results and some brokerage statements at a later date. As for trading I like to say "Trading is a uniquely individualistic process where we all have different time frames, goals, risk tolerances, trading vehicles, but most especially - and this is what really separates the winners from the losers - different levels of commitment." The Poster Boy For Failure I wasn’t into writing books in my younger years. That’s too bad, because as I was about to turn 38 years of age in the spring of 1985, I could have written a national best seller on the art of becoming a failure. For most of my adult life, I was universally acknowledged to be the poster boy on the subject of failure in almost every aspect of life. It was one failed job and one failed relationship after another. But it was in the financial arena where most everyone felt I really excelled at being a bust. You see, I was always dead broke. All my friends, even my parents, had long written me off as someone who was destined to live the rest of their life as a hapless and penniless loser. Even though everyone had pretty much deemed me a failure, I never hung my head low nor did I ever struggle with self esteem issues. While others may have considered me a loser, I never did. I also took solace in the fact that at least I wasn’t a deadbeat. You see, I had a dream, and deadbeats don’t have dreams. My dream , which I had been relentlessly pursuing since I was a 19 years old was to become a millionaire trader in the stock market. Still, at almost 38 years of age, the only place my millionaire trading dream had taken me was to the poor house. I’ve had a passion for the stock market since I was 13 years of age. That passion came about from reading Nicolas Darvas’ How I Made Two Millions Dollars In The Stock market. But it wasn’t until I was a college sophomore that I made my first trade - five shares of stock in Chrysler Corp. I then spent the next nineteen years consumed by the markets. For much of those years, I worked a series of minimum wage jobs to support myself while trying to get my trading off the ground. I was a security guard at a nursing home, delivered circulars door to door and even collected old newspapers and aluminum cans for recycling money. But it had been nineteen years of basically just spinning my wheels with a meager trading account of only a couple thousand dollars. You name it - stocks, options, futures - I traded them, but to no avail. My trading mindset was quick and easy money . But I didn’t limit my get rich quick mentality solely to trading. I spent untold hours at the local racing tracks in my home state of Kentucky. I even made several trips out west to the Nevada casinos. The lowest I sunk was when I got involved first as a participant and then as a promoter, in some questionable work at home schemes. It should come as no surprise then that I lived a life forever in financial distress. Because of perpetual credit card debt, my net worth was always negative. I resided in run down boarding houses or worse. Such as a bug infested basement apartment with little to no heat in the winters. I drove beat-up rusted out cars, could never afford health insurance, and lost count of the times I had to pawn my TV to make it through to the next pay day. My financial struggles hit their lowest depths ever during the spring of 1985. I went through a horrendous two months in my trading where I lost on 22 of 23 trades, the most disastrous losing streak of my career. Then to make matters even worse, I was told my job as an insurance investigator was soon to be terminated due to corporate restructuring. This was one of the few jobs I had over the years that paid above minimum wage. It was also the only one which I had managed to hold onto for more than just a few months. It had been an anchor in my life. It put food on the table and more importantly had enabled me to keep my trading account funded and afloat during the bad times. For the first time in my adult life the thought occurred to me that maybe I should quit trading altogether and move on with my life. I had a college degree. So why not put it to work and find a new career dream and one with retirement and health benefits? Quitting would have been par for the course for me. Throughout my life whenever the going got rough, be it academics, sports, or relationships, I would simply throw in the towel and quit. This time though I didn’t quit. I refused to let a lifetime of failure derail my dream of becoming a millionaire trader. Maybe no one else believed in my trading dream, but I did. One maxim for success in any field is that you believe you can do something and then you persevere until you do it. So I dug in my heels that much harder. At the same time I did something I had never done before and that was to embrace change. One of the biggest changes I made was to replace my trading dreams with actual concrete goals on how to achieve those dreams. During my entire trading career I had pretty much operated as a seat of the pants trader with no goals or plans on how to achieve my dreams. I also ditched my get rich quick trading mentality. In its place I instituted an incremental approach to wealth creation. I quit trying to hit home runs looking for the big payday. Instead, I would consistently try to hit singles and doubles and compound those smaller profits over time into a much larger trading account. Most importantly, after 19 years I finally decided to make a commitment to trading. Isn’t that something? Here I had spent almost 20 years trying to get rich yet never had fully committed myself. The first thing I committed to was making sure I was up every morning for the 6:30AM PST opening of the New York Stock Exchange. Previously, because of laziness and lack of motivation I would always roll out of bed at 9:00 in the morning or later. Also, as part of my newfound commitment, I spent over 100 hours poring over the past several years of my trading statements. I analyzed each and every trade to see exactly what it was that was preventing from becoming a successful trader. The changes I embraced that spring of 1985 led to a complete revamping of my trading habits, behaviors, and beliefs. The problem was I only had around $2300 left in my brokerage account. A few more bad trades and I was under $2000. That forced me to borrow $1000 to get my account back over $2000. Fortunately, the first trade I made after overhauling my trading was one of my best in years as I made $1,473.72 in cocoa. That singular trade, small as it may have been in hindsight, gave me something I had been sorely lacking and that was confidence. From then on out it was up, up, and away. I became consistently profitable in my trading endeavors and began my steady march to my ultimate goal of becoming not just a millionaire trader, but a multi millionaire trader. .
of course you failed, you needed at least 100$ in your account and a 5500$ mentorship from forum expert
For those that don't know, oo7arb is Gary Smith who wrote How I trade for a Living. A good book IMHO and Gary seems like an honest and humble guy.