You are not a trader until you ... Make about a million trading, lose it all, than make it back again after you first earn enough $ to open a new trading account while working min wage jobs. You owe the IRS 100's of thousands dollars for capital gains, of which you never spent a dollar of or even touched it. Become you coke dealers only customer. Nearly purchased in cash a beach house in Hawaii next door to Michelle Pfieffer, and 6 months later your living in a dive hotel. Your tax person reminds now that your broke how they had suggested parking 10k shares of Amazon away long term back in 98, when you could have done that out of you petty cash. Your have just about ticker symbol memorized.
Agreed. I go through about 5,000 daily charts everyday. It's not that difficult. I jot down the ticker symbols that exhibit certain trend. I could have automate it and run a screen. But I choose to do it manual so that I remember and recall the pattern.
You are not a real trader until you ...can sleep deep in the RED...I mean deep, Example: GainsKeeper shows $126,000 in the RED June 30.. to recover and pay Capital Gains Tax for that year....that was a snapshot of 2013 for me.
You are not a trader until you … You stop going to the bank for more loans. I had just started trading futures in the 80's, I thought "wow, this is easy", not knowing the whys of seasonality/weather of Soybeans and having a broker help me who knew less than I did, market was going up, up, up, broker call me almost each day to tell me I had enough to put on another contract, I ran it from 5k to 105k in short time, already was thinking I be a millionaire like next week, then... "what you mean it is Limit down"? what does that mean? Longest 3 days of my life, broker says they got me out and margin call as I was 5k in the hole? F*** Some point I stopped getting loans or using credit cards, no longer needed to use car titles and real estate for collateral, you have to really judge how you doing by your account. You are not a trader until you … You have taken a "major" hit based on exceeding one's back testing but it is a small percentage of your account. You learn back testing will be exceeded both good and back, but gives a roadmap of stats. You are not a trader until you … Stop lying to yourself, so easy to think you getting better and this profession can't be this hard since you are a smart person. Market does not care who you are, some of the brightest have lost everything they had when they went "stick in the mud". Was years of me saying "I am so close" and yet refused to learn how to program, not until I gave in to learn, this made me more of either yes/no, on/off, 0/1 mentality, gave me more discipline. Unless the account is going up, you are going nowhere.
I started 40 years ago doing charts by hand, no home computers back then, but even after I got a P/C, I still maintained the Dow 30 daily charts for another 10 years. For me, eye to hand, a routine has made me decent chartist. I think it helped me greatly being good at charting, before trying to program charting. And along the way, do you start seeing other patterns when you checking for what you are seeking?
I guess I realized I was a "trader" when I would go to sleep with option chains in my head and could thumb nail option strategies in my mind. I also started smoking cigarettes again after 30 years of being a non smoker. Trading is a full time occupation and it will change you. Some changes are good- some not so good. Becoming a "trader" has been a very hard long slow climb with many false summits. For me, at this point, there is no turning back, but thankfully I have fallen in love with it.