practice practice practice watching watching watching striking striking striking rinse and repeat until it becomes autonomic.
The key to being consistent is the word "rigorous". To a certain extent, education does help. There are also certain natural abilities that one might posess which might help as well. However, the true key is being "rigorous". Constantly read, constantly listen, test and re-test your concepts, do not give up (ever), plan, research etc. There is a certain amount of labor that comes with any job whether it be being a mechanic at a dealership or an engineer at Boeing. At any one of these jobs, every person is being "rigorous" as that is their trade. However, if I am a mechanic at a dealership and mess up on your car, Im not going to empty the bank. Therefore the amount of rigour you need to have is on average much higher then a person at the regular job. Whether your very experienced or have no experience, you need to be reading. You need to be planning and constantly learning. Dont worry if you mess up at first. Learning to play a musical instrument does not take one day, but many years of practice. Some people will learn to play the trumpet in a few months, others several years. Bottomline, think "rigorous". You need to be more rigorous then a mechanic or an engineer at Boeing. There is no insurance policy or large corporation insuring our work. The buck stops here. If your not willing to be rigorous then its time to get a regular job...
Perhaps a better poll, one which would at least save a great deal of time, might focus on the reasons why none of the advice given in all these threads cannot penetrate Nathan's skull. Suggestions?
Sadly, I think some people don't want to do the hard work --- to try various approaches --- to struggle --- until they find what actually works for THEM.
that's why we gotta go back to capitalization; it costs money to live test strategies and most cant afford to spend any cash into trainin'. u may already be able to exploit a few inneficencies but to become consistent u gotta find sevreal approaches that work for u in different instruments and time frames, and again it costs money very few can afford to lose.
If they can't afford to lose some $$$ trying out strategies then I think they need to re-think the barriers to trading. In other words, if someone doesn't have enough $$$ in their account then perhaps they need to save up more $$$. Why do other "traditional" businesses fail? Many reasons --- but under capitalization is one as well as not having a good solid business (i.e. tradin) plan.
This is probably by far the most difficult issue to deal with, at least in my experience. You really need to develop a certain "meta"-trading intuition, and by that I mean you have to have the ability to anticipate which apparent "edges" are long-lasting/viable to apply significant capital towards, and which are just temporary "coincidental" finds. I am not a system trader by any means, but I think the problem exists for both system and discrectionary traders -- for the latter, this is THE issue one must resolve to be able to confidently trade as a career. I don't know how many times in the past that I'd thought I'd found my personal grail, only to see it slowly deteriorate then disappear; each time, had I allowed myself to go "all out" with applying my capital, my trading tuition would be far more expensive than it already has been. One tip I can confidently give you from a discrectionary standpoint is that once you (really) find your own way, you will feel no "urgency" to rush into it -- you know "it" will be there as long as the markets are there. This is the opposite of the feeling someone might have when leveraging any trade to the hilt, hoping to hit it fast and hard, because that's his "only decent shot anyways".
perhaps novice traders need to re-read your post a 100 times to fully understand that trading is just like any other business, different module to a petrol station, a bakery, accountancy firm, etc, though still a business.