Anyone can have a good year. But how many years are necessary to consider yourself a successful trader?
My first post here. Have been doing trading / investing for about 10 years. Don't have a really good year. But I am still net positive in my trading account.
How many years are necessary to consider yourself a successful trader? More than how many years, it's When you can identify the reasons for your losses. When you don't look at the prices on the menu. When you have more followers on ET than the number you follow. When you feel you don't have to trade today. When you no longer feel the market is rigged. When you are happy to find manipulated stocks. When you stop worrying about what they are doing. When you have no need to hedge. When you no longer dream of making it. When love is the only emotion you can't control. When you stop giving tips to your friends. When, with the exception of a stop loss, you don't need risk management. When you stop trying to copy what the banks and hedge funds are doing When you stop trying to be like those you read about in Market Wizards. When you don't give a rat's ass about the small loss you just took. When you no longer fear or blame HFT, AI, algos and the like. When the obvious is obvious. When you no longer creep up to your computer. When you've read 100 market books and feel you could write the best one ever. When there are only a few on ET that you pay attention to. When you don't get the urge to trade Bitcoin. When you realize that there is still a lot left to learn. When you stop looking for the best trading platform. When you are really proud of your plan. And last but not least, When you have the time to write stuff like this on ET!! (to be continued)
This is definitely a situation of Quality over Quantity; Some people/traders can spend decades, or basically a lifetime, studying and following the market...yet essentially get nowhere, at all. There's alot of old fools out there that have nothing to show for it. Calling yourself a "successful trader" is rather highly subjective. You can call yourself good or great or stellar, but there will always be others out there criticizing you saying it was luck or a fluke or a bull market. You have to compare yourself to your peers -- your market -- and the outer collective trading/investing world as a whole throughout history, There are various types of "successful trader"....you can have explosive exponential returns that was quick and short. Or you can have a few percentage points above the S&P 500 that have been relatively consistent for the past 50 years. Both are successful in my eyes. Make Trading Great Again 2018, ET extraterrestrials
Disagree. Once you figure it out, "K.I.S.S." style, there's virtually nothing left to learn. Candidly, I doubt I've learned anything "new" about playing the markets in the last 10 years or more. I suspect that's because everything important about trading could be printed on a 3"x5" index card. Recent story about famous Linda Raschke... claimed she "learned something new every day". How can that be??
That's what's left for you to learn!! I've been at this for over 40 years, and still do find new tactics etc. , just as chess players find new moves. That's not to say that you have to. But if you eat this stuff up, you'll look!
"What" do I have left to learn? I keep looking, but I don't find anything. It's not like chess. It's more like the laws of physics. (I was being conservative about "not learning anything new for the last 10 years"... it's actually 20 years.) There are still challenges to trading, but they're not about "figuring it out". Trading is a lot like mining for gold. There is lots of "overburden", but it's not complicated or cryptic.