TZ, I used to find your posts utterly annoying. But now when I see your moniker I know you are about to walk up and slap some newbie across the face and if he falls off his stool you'll kick him in the gut a couple times to boot! Since the violence isn't real its: HIGHLY ENTERTAINING.
There are a lot of us looking forward to meeting TZ in person during a meeting break. He is mulling it over and when he decides, we will have him pick up his tickets and room reservations. Who knows maybe someone will make a video of his appearance at the break time. There will be people wearing a real nice assortment of traditional clothing from all over the world to provide a little background interest. He will have the floor during a break to ask his questions about the characterisitcs of making money using his personal measures. Then he gets to learn what is what in making money.
So you got a kicked in the nads â we all have â now go look in a mirror and ask yourself the real question⦠What are you going to do now? Buying and selling have been around as long as humans â it requires nothing new, fresh, or ingenious to figure out And as far as finding out you donât know anything â neither do I â oh well⦠We only fail when we quit trying⦠So if youâre hell bent on being a trader â best you stand up, dust yourself off, and get to the business at hand If youâre ready to throw in the towel â I wish much success to you in whatever you do Sir For as a trader - We must always keep it real RN
Funny, in the years I've been doing this, I've found the exact opposite. Luck has little or nothing to do with long term success. I've found that when I'm working really hard at it, doing everything I know I'm supposed to do, my results show it, and even more obviously, if I try to trade without doing my homework or when I know that for whatever reason, I shouldn't, I get my ass handed to me. Oh, and by the way, the equivalent of one calendar year of trading wasn't enough for me to figure out how to overcome the psychological problems and newb mistakes that were preventing me from trading well (I am talking about intraday trading here; position trading was much easier to develop).
What is it with these newbs who expect to make bank in less than a year?! 1 year is nothing. Try 7-10 years. Some get it in 2-5. I consider them lucky. Keep going. Or give up. 20% a month is not hard. There's about 10 edges I filed away that do at least that. It's possible. That's all you need to know.
Its not his fault. I think everyone who started in this business had those expectations when they began. Its one thing to look at charts in a book, but its another to trade on a live screen. It seems a lot easier at first.
I think that newbie consider market as sure thing. But it is not, at all. There is a lot of randomness in the market, and new traders get confused and ask themselves: what did I do wrong? They don't do wrong, just the makret is like this. With consitent efforts, keeping trading rules, letting the profit run (if there is any) the results will be consistent, too.
Good for you. Please redefine your timeline for success to 3-5 years minimum. 5,000 to 10,000 hours screen time before consistent profitability. Maybe less. Maybe more. Here's some gold. Focus exclusively on price action. No indicators. NOT ONE. Now, spend the next 3-4 years watching price. Theorize price patterns in as many ways as you can possibly imagine, using only price. Next. KEEP A JOURNAL of every failed or moderately successful strategy. Write down the actual strategy so a year from now, when you circle back to ground you already covered, you won't FORGET this is an old, bankrupt idea, and not to pursue it any further. That's how big a task this is for most. Years 5 and 6 I didn't keep a journal. I went through 60+ losing strategies at least twice each, since by the time i had got back to the first one, I had forget I had already covered it. This game is all about iterative refinement. When you're getting close, it still requires more iteration and iteration. Take a day or week off? Go on vacation for few days? Fight with the wife or work drama stressing you out? All the finer details go out the window and it could take weeks - or months - to recall all the minutia epiphanies you forgot, and the absolutely critical contextual information is gone. This is really no joke. That's why traders say you can't work a job and learn to trade at the same time. The constant interruptions and relinquishment of one thought process for another, one totally different mindset for another, corrupts the whole learning process because in many respects, trading can be incredibly subtle, with TONS of nuances, false positives and periodic real deal edges all thrown at you, at *nearly* the same time, with varied occurrence as the market range expands and contracts like a living, breathing organ. Make no mistake, this is the Ultimate Game. It's an ecosystem. With the top of the foodchain harvesting the bottom 98% scrambling to eat. There is not one edge, but many of differing extraction potential and window of opportunity. Keep going. Also focus on psychology (not yours) in addition to price action. If you don't know what price action is, just ask.