i am at my 5 year mark now, and i feel that i have hit another stumbling block akin to when i first started. The journey NEVER ends.
I don't fully buy it... folks such as John Arnold and Paul Tudor Jones were extremely wealthy after a few years... NOW THAT'S A FACT! The bottom line is if you learn properly from the correct sources, then you'll have a short learning curve before becoming extremely profitable. However, most folks learn from the wrong sources or through "trail & error". In such cases, it's a LONG and PAINFUL journey, assuming that you ever get there...
Ted Williams said the hardest thing in all of sports was to hit a baseball. I think there is some truth in that, but since Williams was nearly unparalleled as a hitter, the statement was also self-serving. I played D1 baseball and would have loved to have been a professional, but I understood that it was not the difficulty of hitting a baseball that would keep me out of the majors, but my physical construction, no matter how much I worked I did not have the natural hand eye coordination to make my living playing professional baseball. Trading is difficult. Friends and acquaintances often ask me what it takes to trade. Besides something called capital, I always tell them not many people can trade because they are not psychologically constructed to trade. I will not say that trading ever came easy, but I knew very quickly that trading was something that I was naturally good at. When I made more money trading part-time than I made from a profession for which I had invested a graduate education in, as well as a couple of decades of my life, I then knew it was time to take a bigger risk than I ever took with the money that I put in the market. I stepped away from a career from I which I could probably NEVER re-enter at the level that I left, if at all. It takes a certain psychological construction to take that risk as well as the daily routine risks involving what is a HUGE amount of money to most average folk. When people obsess about how difficult trading is, I often wonder if they think trading for a living is something anyone can do, if they work hard enough. I think trading for a living requires more than the desire and effort to overcome the difficulty involved with profitable trading. It requires some things which are inherent to one's nature. As I knew I did not have the physical requirements to make a living playing baseball, I was just as confident that I had the psychological requirements to trade for a living, so I confident that I stepped away from my professional career to test my belief. Yes, trading is difficult. But frankly, I do not like to go around saying how difficult trading is, because it looks very self-serving to say it, when one is in fact doing very well at it. If a profitable trader joins the how difficult trading is Greek chorus, then I think he is being self-serving in doing so. And one thing that I am certain of, there is no place in the character of the profitable trader for ego and arrogance, the market can and will humble you in a nano second the instant that you accept your profitability with anything other than extreme humility.
1-focus on only ONE future, stock, option, Forex cross..become a 'master' 2-do not over trade 3-do not revenge trade
The path to successful trading is a series of decisions. About 9. As a person goes down the path, he, from what the conventional wisdom says, takes a long time (by his nature to wait to learn). The tipping point could be at any time. In this thread, no one who has posted has reached it. As a tangible proof of this, a fourrier analysis of the heart waveform may be used. Probably most posters would not get to a point where they would venture into self analysis. Below you see the human feedback loop that either impedes progress or accelerates it. As you can see the beginning trader is "empty" with regard to making money and trading: he is ignorant regarding his inference. there are many other facets that predicate against learning to trade. I will post 10 of them over time so people can reason through why they fail.
Selecting a very high % of setups that quickly become winning trades (I'm mainly a day trader) is something I'm very good at, but pulling the trigger on them quickly is something I'm terrible at. Really terrible. I trade about 20%, sometimes less, of the setups I see. I've made a 30% return on my account this year but it's not enough. I need a minimum 100% return. I think this undercapitalization is my only barrier to achieving my profit goals. Which means that what's holding me back is purely the mental game. What would you recommend?
You have one very small problem. It will take a couple hours on your machine to cure it. Schedule, please. regards, J.
Trading is so easy. I am going to turn 5k into 150k this year and should be up to 500k by next year. I will make 500$ minimum a day using moving averages. It is so easy.