actually pekolo, those are good points there is no hard and fast stat as to the # of traders that fail ( as defined by blowing up and quitting or just quitting after a year or two) however, i have heard the failure rate for businesses is on the high side of the 80% range. and it is TOTALLY true about a business plan. people treat trading like an arcade game. trading is not about magic indicators, grail setups, and frenetically buying and selling it is about MANAGING risk, in a methodical well planned manner, so your edge can come to fruition again, it is good that people do not have business plans in trading, because they improve liquidity and make the market easier to trade.
i also wonder what the % of traders who have success never blow up at all, i would imagine that is INCREDIBLY small. I think an essential trait is to be able to get back up after the market KOs you.
I will not respond to this post, rather, I will have Mr. Jesse Livermore respond from the grave to your post. "Disregarding the big swing and trying to jump in and out was fatal to me. Nobody can catch all the fluctuations. In a bull market your game is to buy and hold until you believe that the bull market is near its end. To do this you must study general conditions and not tips or special factors affecting individual stocks." "I can't tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way." âFrom then on I began to think of basic conditions instead of individual stocks. I promoted myself to a higher grade in the hard school of speculation. It was a long and difficult step to take.â "There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do in order not to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin to learn!" "Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market to-day has happened before and will happen again. I've never forgotten that." "I knew something was wrong somewhere, but I couldn't spot it exactly. But if something was coming and I didn't know where from, I couldn't be on my guard against it. That being the case I'd better be out of the market." âYou may remember the story I told you about that time when I was short thirty-five-hundred Sugar in the Cosmopolitan and I had a hunch something was wrong and Iâd better close the trade? Well, I have often had that curious feeling. As a rule, I yield to it. But at times I have pooh-poohed the idea and have told myself that it was simply asinine to follow any of these sudden blind impulses to reverse my position. I have ascribed my hunch to a state of nerves resulting from too many cigars or insufficient sleep or a torpid liver or something of that kind. When I have argued myself into disregarding my impulse and have stood pat I have always had cause to regret it.â âIf a stock doesnât act right donât touch it; because, being unable to tell precisely what is wrong, you cannot tell which way it is going. No diagnosis, no prognosis. No prognosis, no profit.â âBut not even a world war can keep the stock market from being a bull market when conditions are bullish, or a bear market when conditions are bearish. And all a man needs to know to make money is to appraise conditions.â "There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily - or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play. I proved it." âThe desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money every day, as though they were working for regular wages.â âA stock operator has to fight a lot of expensive enemies within himself.â âI donât know whether I make myself plain, but I never lose my temper over the stock market. I never argue with the tape. Getting sore at the market doesnât get you anywhere.â âIt takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that general principle fixed firmly in my mind than it did most of the more technical phases of the game of stock speculation.â âThe game taught me the game. And it didnât spare the rod while teaching.â
The word "manipulation" and "manipulator" is so abused on trading boards by obvious losers. Take responsibility. Trading isn't easy money......until you learn how to trade. Pay your dues or quit. Jesse Livermore said: "I can't have much sympathy for the man who blames others for his own failure to make easy money. He is a devil of a clever fellow when he wins. But when he loses money the other fellow was a crook; a MANIPULATOR".
if you failed at stock market, try forex trading you also need to worry about advice people on ET give such as this one and the one before, and ...the one before I mean all joke aside, I've actually given false direction to people because hey we are all competitors did I mention that I am a hard ass. uuuu yeahh lets blame the hard ass, but did it ever occur to you that its the world's fault not mine
Why don't you try trading 1 lot & only then you will understand, paper trading is OK, so is simulated trading, but difference being is that you simply do not care due to no real money being at stake. Give it a go & you will understand.
You just found a way to make your money back. Turn this phrase into a bumper sticker! I'll buy one for $50.