this kind of advice is downright dangerous, worse than losing a few thousand, wasting 5-10 years is unforgivable. Hell, wasting 1 year is unforgivable. sorry guys if you are a failure no amount of time will help you because you will make the same mistakes over and over again .
neurosciences findings : super performances comes when neurons "reconnect" in a certain way. And this rewiring of the brain for super performance does take time. <iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/KX8mR-x35Pk?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
Floor doesn't equal electronic. People on the floor rely on reading the behavior of other people to judge direction. In electronic there is no group of people to read. The environment changed. They couldn't adapt. It's survival of the fittest with the fittest being those who can adapt.
The Author of this thread was merely describing his experience of trading , if anything he was advising against spending 10 years trading without sucsess.
Having been a floor trader, I can say that the floor teaches you specific skills for that pit, but also some general things about assessing market action: Is the bid or offer being hit, are the spreads bid, where are the commercials bidding/offering, where are the locals positioned/bidding/offering, what are related and even unrelated markets doing, and on and on. Is this useful, and can it be transferred to the screen? Yes and no, and that's a whole 'nother discussion. The problem, as I see it, with all trading, is that there is a progression to go through that is somewhat unlike learning other skills. Think about the comparison to learning a musical instrument. The first thing one needs to figure out is what to DO. Since there are any number of viable approaches to trading, people spend a lot of time sorting though these. Books are written, for the most part, by people who's methods worked once, but would not work nearly as well now (ala Market Wizards), or by people who don't really trade much, but write a lot. Think about it: if you had an edge, would you write about and sell it in a book? This leaves chat rooms, anonymous web sources and fora, and so on, mostly populated by those who don't know; just read any sampling here on ET. In playing, say, the piano, it is reasonably easy to figure out how to start, how to progress, and what to practice, and this leads to the next issue discussed here - practice. Without know what to DO, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to know what to practice. So whether "deliberate" practice or any other kind of practice is important, or whether 1, 2, or 37 years, or 10,000 hours are necessary is an irrelevant question if one does not know what to do. For the vast majority, this is where the quest ends, or simply devolves into an endless and pointless loop: Read or hear about something, "test" it some some way (usually backtesting), try it, find it doesn't work, and then repeat with a new idea or approach. Another problem is that markets, due to technological advances, varying efficiencies, economics, politics, and multiple other inputs, change over time. Trying to fight today's and, importantly, tomorrow's battles with the weaponry and tactics of yesterday's battles may not work well at all (and usually doesn't). By contrast, the violin does not constantly add and subtract stings, lengthen or shorten the fretboard, change tunings, the musical keys do not change, and so on - this is a fairly static environment compared to markets. Is this commentary some sort of answer? Not really, just an invitation to think about what one is really up against when attempting to learn to trade. In my experience, it's figure out what to do, practice this, then be able to adapt; i.e. figure what to do all over again, then practice this.
+1 --- trading can really be a black hole of time. You can spend years and still not figure anything out that'll be profitable. You have to hustle and really concentrate on figuring out things that'll work. Trading is not like a musical instrument where you put in time to reach a certain level of competence.
I think it's more to do with information than practice. There's a few traders on trade2win who have proved their ability and are obviously making lots of money everyday. They won't tell me how they do it, but they both tell me that it's nothing to do with charts OR time+sale/DOM reading etc. They say it's nothing that you will ever find in a book or on the internet. I think I'll spend my life looking for whatever it is. Both of these traders admitted that they were shown by successful traders and both said that they would never have found 'it' by themselves due to the mental shift in thinking required.