There's a reason why I got involved in this thread (outside of the fact that we have another dead market today so far). Padu's example has some interesting lessons to learn from: why people trade. If you are trading because it's a business, you work like any entrepreneur: you actively seek solutions to problems, you go after information and proactively seek evidence to confirm or refute a certain path. Time and capital are limited, so you need to work efficiently. Padu doesn't appear to do that, and when I was starting it was similar for me. I remember when I went to my first trader meetup here locally, I was asking a lot of questions and trying desperately to find what could work for me. I wanted to get into ES futures right away. Luckily a guy stopped me and told me that I'd ruin my account in no time, and he introduced me to FX. That saved my a$$ from ruin because I could experiment with teensy amounts of money. And that showed me how hard trading really was, as opposed to the 'just 2 pts a day' idiocy that is always marketed. But I remember how he and this other lady told me "you're grasping... you're not focused". That was a very serious problem for a long time. I was all over the place. And people often are because they are looking to get involved in the markets for all the wrong reasons. For me it was going to be easy money without a boss (that's 80% of everyone right there). Hard focused work did not seem to fit that equation, and you then get into this stupid mode where you think that just by showing up and pressing buy and sell you'll eventually get it. No you won't, not without study of both the market and yourself, not without understanding the long path of discovery until you find a methodology and market that works for you, not without understanding the huge variance in market behavior and thus income this business brings, etc.
Continuing on my critique of Brooks, since we have a very dead stock indeces out there... There are two problems when trying to find a methodology. You have one set of vendors saying they have some 'special method' which will give you those magical 2 points a day (I remember this guy John Paul and the 'Atlas Line', which ended up being the subject of litigation when someone blew open his strategy on one futures forum), then you have others like Brooks who give you a whole plethora of 'strategies'. The problem with the first is that all strategies have cold and hot periods, and you have to be very well familiar with different market environments to know when to stay out, as well as when to tweak the strategy. Without patience and experience, and lots of back testing, you will quickly grow frustrated and the discipline will go out the window. The problem with the second, as with Brooks, is you get this false impression that you can squeeze every point out of every move, since Brooks at the end of the day makes it appear there were lots of tradable setups, all depending on your 'style'. That makes it impossible to see the market through the lens of one or two strategies, and when inevitably you get a not so good day, you start overtrading like crazy - "oh that there is a reversal... that there is a high 2, that there is a final flag whatever...". Before you know it you've made 10 trades and you are really just grasping at stuff. And the way Brooks speaks, he is so general that it's really 100% upon you to start focusing in on specific ideas and shaping them your way. Most people can't or won't do that, they want to give themselves this impression like they should be able to carve the turkey for every last morsel of meat, and then end up very much underwater.
Padu, I just looked into my archives of messages at Brooks' forum from years ago. There was one guy who was doing pretty well for himself and I asked him what steps he took to become proficient. Here is what he said: " I printed out two years worth of charts and spent many hours looking for setups." Have you done something like this?
i have an application problem it is not a knowledge problem. and when you have no choice but to topstep then you are doubly screwed. and you have to be able to sit 6-18 hours in front of charts and take maybe 3 set ups. you cannot make millions.
So you have a very well defined trading plan that is the result of doing a lot of chart study, you can define your conditions for entry and trade management, but you just can't follow that plan, is that correct?