Why have I shared so many articles up till now?
As trading is a job, I've provided one instructional post per day.
A job is the culmination of numerous talents that must be learned.
One talent alone won't turn you into a successful trader.
Speaking for myself and the other members of my trading group, only the combination of all these abilities gives us a chance to be financially successful.
One of the most difficult and financially rewarding activities is trading.
Focus on you first.
Your trading success is a direct reflection of your own qualities.
It’s just is.
If your business isn't lucrative, you committed some errors.
And if you did make them, it's because you haven't worked hard enough on improving yourself.
Having excellent trading signals is undoubtedly an important tool to have, but this is insufficient.
Additionally, I'm stating this as someone who markets trading signals (and a trading course). When I was a back office Quant in a previous life, we were urged to exercise, practice meditation, eat well, get at least seven hours of sleep each night, engage in social activities, etc.
A trader must first be a terrific human being with excellent habits that will only lead to perfection.
How is it possible for someone who is overweight, sleeps just four hours a night, struggles with mental/emotional control, and has such demanding work to expect to perform well?
YOU JUST CAN’T.
Trading is challenging enough as it is, and the market understands just how to rob those who didn't put enough effort into improving themselves of their hard-earned money.
Your skill set varies
I had to learn about sales, marketing, negotiating, copywriting, accounting, tax optimization, coding, recruiting, developing a corporate culture, and other things as an entrepreneur running internet enterprises.
It takes more than one talent to bootstrap a business.
Combining them all offered me a chance to achieve.
The same is true of trading.
Any really successful trader I am aware of only got successful after investing a significant amount of time and effort into developing the necessary abilities. And I'm not referring to knowledge that can be acquired quickly.
Learning how to: (not a complete list)
- Meditate.
- Refrain from trading when I'm exhausted, ill, or angry.
- Set my ego aside and occasionally return to trade with lesser positions.
- Take my daily profit and leave my home and walk outside.
- Eat and sleep correctly.
- Take deep breaths, and practice NSDR (Non-Sleep Deep Rest)
- Building muscles and exercising appropriately - I'm quite certain that men's testosterone levels and their willingness to take on and manage challenging jobs are directly related.
- Being greedy is a lesson that requires a few harsh knocks to the head before it sinks in.
- Never assume – I frequently exited trades before the stop-loss or entered too soon, front-running some signal(s), which, in hindsight, was truly a poor move.
- Game theory and psychology
- Multiple programming languages for trading scripts and trading bots
- Listen to the appropriate mentors, or traders, who are far wealthier than I am
- etc...
These are my everyday, non-negotiable behaviors. Those abilities together have made me an extremely disciplined person.
It's not necessarily a hint that your signals are poor if you're not yet profitable.
Additionally, you need to have some trading expertise to determine whether they are terrible or not. This results from taking a significant number of transactions over a lengthy period of time.
For the majority of you, your lack of profitability is a result of unfinished business.
Additionally, every deal you make has an impact on you.
More than you work on your trades, they work on you.
That is to say, as you continue to learn about yourself, you get more skillful the more trades you pursue.
A positive feedback cycle.
Many traders who suffered catastrophic losses as a result of errors understood how to recover their losses and more because... They already have the needed abilities.
Conclusion:
Due to the time-consuming nature of mastering all those abilities, a red-pilled trader may opt to invest all of his or her capital in a 100% trading bot.
"Good luck with your endeavor, you'll probably ruin yourself," is my counsel to that individual.
If you don't believe me... well… I spent around five years in NYC writing trading bots as a back office quant.
Compared to 99.99% of individuals, I tested and created more bots.
Sellers of retail trading bots are marketing an idea, a fantasy that, by definition, isn't representative of reality. No matter the approach, it's doubtful that a 100% automated bot will perform well over term because market circumstances are always shifting.
We're currently in new territory due to a very high inflation rate, intense international tensions, intense populist disobedience of their governments, the WEF, WHO,... (And how could we not blame them after what they had done to us over the previous two years?)
Anyway, I strongly advise learning to trade manually before learning how to operate a bot because I designed non-retail trading
I'll continue to post a couple pieces like this once a week since they help me organize my ideas and because helping others makes me feel good about myself.