There's such a thing as "psyching yourself up". The opposite expression used is not "psyched down" but "psyched out". They do this stuff in sports all the time. They use cheerleaders to psych the team up, and war-chants to psych the other team out. The same thing happens with stock trading, and you can see it happening all over these boards. People who see the market as a competitive field, and feel threatened by any competition, and need to psych others out and tell them "you can't do it". "Psyched out" is aptly phrased, because they want to psych you right out of the game altogether. "You can't possibly make it with your small investment", "you should give it up, quit, you'll never make it as a trader". - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Well, I'm here to say You can do it. You need a kind of luck, you need a kind of intuition. But that kind of intuition is precisely what gets smothered by all the psyching-out. You need to be, not psyched up, but psyched in. You could have made ten times your money if you had bought call options on IBM, or many other stocks, one month ago. One trade. You didn't need a hundred daytrades a trade. Just one trade. Buy the calls, sit with them, one month later sell the calls. 1,000% profit. You can't do it with a flip of the coin every day of the week. But you can do it. It can be done. The first step is to not let yourself be psyched-down by those who want to psych you out. Psych yourself in. Tune in, turn on, and don't drop out. That is, to the market. Sometimes to tune in and turn on to the market, you need to tune out and turn off, to the people telling you it can't be done.
You sound a lot like I did before I realized just how difficult trading is. I do believe it is possible, but it requires *WORK*. This includes: Studying the market Watching Patterns Developing a system Refining an edge Programming (if you can) Testing Examining results It requires a *LOT* of work. Tons and tons of work.
hiaiooo, Can I ask you, have you done it? In other words, why should anybody listen to or believe you? I originally thought I had stumbled onto quite a gold mine with this site, but the more I read the more it seemed to me that there are quite a few people here that in no way, shape or form qualify for the title "elite" trader. Perhaps you are one of them. Perhaps you aren't. My guess is that you are.
Can I ask you, aphexcoil, how you ever intend to actually do that work you refer to when all you do is post your life away on this website?
And then there are people making money doing none of the above....money management and lots of fading power....
Excellent post. There are many naysayers who are eager to discourage newcomers. Fortunately there are a few who are willing to help. And as my ignore list gets longer and longer, they become easier to find. --Db
I always like to help newbies. It gives me a good feeling to help someone else and it helps me firm up my own strategies by having to describe them. I too am developing a long ignore list. There are a lot of jerks out there for sure
I don't claim to be an "elite trader". There was no qualification exam to take in order to join this forum, other than to have a valid e-mail address. I don't intend to hold myself up as something I'm not, or claim to have accomplished things I have not accomplished. What motivated me to make my original post here, however, is my growing observation that certain people who post here are not so much "elite traders" as "elitist traders". They like to handicap a small trader with biased trading restrictions and then sneer at him and say "you can't possibly succeed". I'm here to say we can succeed. Not automatically, not assuredly, but possibly. Give us a level playing field. The elitist traders don't like the idea of competition. They want the competition to be unfairly slanted in their favor. If some small potatoes trader can show them up by turning $2,000 into $25,000, the elitists would feel a sense of their own personal inadequacy, because it would mean they ought to be able to turn their $25,000 into $300,000, and they know that even with all their strategies and technical gizmos they are hopeless to do that well. So tell the small potato guy that he should quit. That might work. Psych him out of the game at first base. Tell him he can't possibly succeed and give him reasons why. Psych him out at second base. And if that still isn't enough, make sure he's shackled with extra restrictions to make sure he's unable to succeed in level competition. Tag him out before he ever gets to leave third base.