From my own relatively limited experience (10 months of trading) I beleive the biggest challenge facing a new trader is not to get stuck only playing the market in one direction. As a product of the bear market my trading has been on the short side - I beleive this is only natural as that has been the overall trend. Now for the life of me I cannot bring myself to go long, I also realize this will be severely detrimental to my trading progress ! Even though I can (at times) recognize decent long risk/reward setups I don't have the conviction to enter the trades. I imagine this is also true for any failed traders of the late nineties that refused to adapt to the new market conditions.