Don't trade under pressure. If you have to trade to put food on the table, the pressure will color your judgement and forces you to make mistakes.
- Trading is 10x harder than I expected it to be...at least. - Keep bet sizes small until you are making money. - If you only dabble in this game you will lose all of your money, it takes severe dedication and discipline. - If you quite you will never be good at trading. - Learning how to accept losses without them knocking you into the dirt is of utmost importance. Some Down time after a big loss is acceptable but dont waste too much time slapping yourself in the mirror. - People would rather be right about their theory than make money. Especially smart people. - When you are winning, bet more. When you are losing, bet less. - Jesse Livermore and George Soros are gods of trading.
That's why one should trade like they will be having Kraft Mac n' Cheese for dinner every night. If they have a good day, they can add tuna and have a casserole. (I know, an insult to chefs everywhere) Right ironCHEF? Mmm mmmgood! heheh!
When you personalize loses you can't trade, "scared $ always loses". Having a job, even if just part time, will go a long ways in helping with this. To be a winning trader you will have to create your own unique strategy, following somebody else's is unlikely to work over the long run. Trading profitably is a never ending task of problem solving our flaws & changing behavior, this takes a lot of effort but can be done. This X-games rider who refused to say 'I can't".
Hey buddy, I can feel your pain and am in a very similar situation with the deepest sympathy. I was in a niche sector that paid alright, unfortunately covid hit and killed my sector. I have no jobs to return to and have dependents so i took up daytrading right away. I have had some experience with swing trading over the past 5 years, but that is not good enough to provide consistent income. So i took up option thinking that the leverage can help which it did at the beginning. I was making really consistent income with credit spread on SPX until one day it made a huge move (gamma risk) against me, so i had to roll all my contracts many months out which means my money is locked and I cannot deploy it anywhere else. That is when i realized this is not good strategy for consistent income. Then I dived into the world of quant for futures market only to jump from strategies to strategies on Tradingview. Something that looked good based on TV backtest did not perform well live. Only after i few months of TV i realized TV is not giving enough backtesting data. So i picked up and learned python in a month (no prior programming knowledge) and wrote some scripts to extract historic data from IB and also use backtrader to perform "real" backtest. Which then i figured out pretty much all of the strategies that seemed to have work does not work with 2 years worth of backtest. I am now in my 3rd wakening which is diving into forex pairs. The price movement overall is a little bit less random than indices where some of the algo backtest actually turned out to be positive. But my account is already a quarter down and I do not have the confidence to deploy it. I am now manually trading FX and has found something which I think works for me. I am still not profitable but at least for the past few weeks, this strategy i am using is allowing me to breakeven which is already a big deal compare to the many months of loss. Everyday I am tweaking it a little bit more and study my loosing trades to figure out which part of the process needs improvement, whether R:R or drawing support resistance or stoploss etc. At times I feel the mental pain, especially when my wife gets upset for loosing money again and again. But overall I am proud of my progress to becoming a better trader day by day. Never would I imagined learning programming and options and FX in such a short period of time. I believe that I am really close to finding my edge as each failure taught me something important. It may sound cliché, but just hope that you keep your head up and keep learning/pushing for your edge. Also as some others mentioned, papertrade is important. If I did not papertrade, my account would have probably blown up months ago.
I got a reminder on these today...it takes way more courage to make money than I thought. When you are big in the green way up on a (still) good position you aren’t supposed to close it like a scared bum... also, stop betting poorly on the crash that never comes.
“They say you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don’t. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market. Where I should have made twenty thousand dollars I made two thousand. That was what conservatism did for me.” — Jesse Lauriston Livermore
Yes, we chefs only cook fancy meals for paying customers. Even when we are killing it we drive secondhand Yugo instead new Tesla X.
It can be done. You are not going to make it if you picked up trading not because you were passionate but because you could not find another job. If you are really passionate, find a job, any job that can put food on the table so you don't have the pressure of having to make money trading. In your spare time, hone your trading skill and one day in the not too distant future, you will quit your day job and trade full time. And you will never look back.