The study to get your brain acclimated to successful trading may be perceived as hard work, but actual trading is very very easy. Most folks try to reinvent the wheel, but at it's core, trading is simply about managing risk---nothing else.
^This is the typical profile of a trader who trades for a living. OP- You are trading against the most intelligent minds in the world. I have never heard of an athlete train for 10 minutes a day and beat olympians who dedicate their lives to the sport. Over time and with large numbers, not $50k, trading is difficult and requires time. The proof is in the failure rates, but ignore them bc trading for ten minutes is your sweet spot. Can you scale up the size and add the pressure of $1mm? If you can, I'll send you all of my money. You are the greatest trader in history if 'your system' has such a phenomenal win rate while you stay relaxed and just hit that buy and sell button. I expect books and fame from your 10 minute talent. Your name will become a permanent part of the trading lexicon.
But there's no way to define "hard work". Clearly it isn't physical (unless someone is pulling an 18-hour shift trading forex). It certainly shouldn't be stressful - if you're getting an ulcer from trading, full-time consideration of another endeavour might be in order (or retirement). It might be mentally tiring - but so is chess, and almost nobody makes any money from this, though it has great similarities with trading. From my memory of Mark Douglas's work, he suggested that some traders just have to have the self-perception that they are working hard - and if these individuals don't get that from trading, they will find ways to sabotage their own performance. Sounds convincing.
Work smarter not harder. Too many people have the mistaken belief that more hard work = more profit. As if throwing hard work at something will solve any problem in the world. There are times when working hard is very efficient and times when it is not. At university I had to do a team project with a team full of Chinese students. Asians have a tendency to worship the notion that more hard work will solve anything (look at suicide rates in Japan and Korea). They wanted to meet twice a week for months on the project for hours at a time, even though the whole thing wasn't even that complicated. I showed up for every single one, and they worked diligently each time, and what they came up with was very bland and unoriginal. There was another group who only met once the entire semester and schlepped something together within hours and called it good. But it was interesting and creative, no one else had used their concept before. That group received an A. The group I was in full of diligent hard working Chinese students received an 83. The funny thing was that they all assumed they would get an A, and were upset and felt wronged when they didn't. It's almost amusing how you see people who are constantly surprised that someone else did way less work than them and achieved much more in the same amount of time. But it's how the world works. Useful, intelligent, creative ideas that are thought up of in minutes are worth more than decades of diligently following a set path. That's why entrepreneurs make a ton of money and the people who work for them who put in all that effort don't. Failure to understand this is why there are so many socialists nowadays. People just have a tendency to feel that someone who achieves a lot for what they perceive as only a small amount of effort are cheaters and don't deserve what they earn. What they don't realize is that it is what's in their mind that's worth gold. You can sit outside and dig a bunch of holes and fill them back up again and that would be hard work, but it wouldn't be worth a cent because it doesn't benefit anyone. You can invent the personal computer, and become the richest man in the world without having to do a single thing more in your entire life because it benefits everyone in the world a lot. Same applies to trading, I'd say. Someone who puts together a system that consistently beats the market can make a living working only an hour a day. Nothing wrong or unbelievable about that at all. Someone who puts in a lot of effort every day but never learns to control their impulses or develop a system may work 10 hours a day and not make a penny. Think of the kid in high school who walked into every single test with zero study and aced everything while their friends sat there jealous because they had received C's despite having study sessions for hours. Forget the notion that success is a direct function of work. Be pragmatic and think of a practical way to profit regardless of how much work it requires.
You have to separate the two, hard work and intelligence. A person who has more intelligence doesn't have to do as much of a work as the person who has lesser intelligence. But it doesn't mean that he should not be hardworking. The more hardworking he is, the more he will achieve. With intelligence, he will achieve even more. Hard work is always a good thing, never a bad thing.
ark93, Good example, but I disagree with you. The key is to work smart AND work hard. Working smart: means preparing a plan and goal before execution. In this plan the following must be analyzed: risk of failure and risk of success. The working smart is the plan. The plan is where the goal is analyzed to confirm the goal can be accomplished. A measured goal. Working Hard: means executing the plan laid out in the working smart phase. Working hard means solving problems that will occur while executing the plan. It may even mean revising the plan. The Chinese students earned B and the other group earned an A. This means nothing.
In America today we live in a time where you can make a living and enjoy life with little or no risk. We grew up learning how to live risk free. Work hard in school, get decent grades, get a job. It was drilled into us in our formative years. 2+2 is always 4. Put that on a test and get an A. Trading is ALL about risk, and most people don't know how to handle it. That is why trading seems like hard work. It is a foreign concept.
WRONG. Trading is all about knowing how to trade to be consistently profitable, and most people do not know how to trade to be consistently profitable.
To be consistently profitable you HAVE to manage risk. Risk is inherent in all trading and it is the hardest thing to grasp for most people.