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I've been inspired by my first trade in this year and I've decided to start this topic to help people become a profitable trader.
Who are you to educate people you can say. I'm just a guy who wants to get a living out of trading. Like you. That's it.
My mother tong is not English. Please do not expect perfect writing.
If you like what I wrote I would ask you to do me a favor. All you have to do is to Google "Belarus wiki" and educate yourself where is the country of Belarus.
When I tell people I'm from Belarus they are usually looking at me as at alien. If you feel I'm asking too much, then just please read below it's still for you .
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
We all already know why traders fail. They trade on emotions and fears.
If you already know that then why do you start to trade. I can give 99% you will fail anyway.
In other words imagine you are a hockey team of amateurs. Would you play against professionals? Do you have chances to win? I doubt it.
First of all sportsmen train themselves daily, play with others like they. They do not compete with professionals right away.
All beginners traders start compete with professionals. You are a beginner. Do you think you can compete with professionals? Really?
Then why do you start to trade unprepared?
To be a profitable trader you need to prepare yourself before you dive with sharks.
We already know that our first problem is to overcome emotions and fears.
How we can do that? There are two options:
1. Hire a psychologist
2. Do it yourself
We'll review option 1 first.
It's expensive you can say. No it is not. There are tons of psychos oversea that you can hire through Skype for $25 -40 per hour.
If you speak another language you can try those countries the language you speak. If you speak only
English you can try Philippines or India as an example.
You need to find the one who can teach you control your mind, your emotions and fears.
Expect to do it for year once a week. So you need to find about $120 a month extra money to spend on psycho.
It's $1560 per year. It is expensive you can say.
I can tell you it would be the best money you've ever spent. It will pay you back in real life.
You change yourself first of all. You become a different person.
And it will help you to become a profitable trader.
Also it should be a good psycho and you should get homework from him/her after each lesson.
Do it yourself. Personally I think if you can't find $120 per month you should not trade.
When I served in army we had two rules:
Rule #1 The manager is always right
Rule #2 If the manager is not right look at rule # 1.
You can say that people from poor countries who are on this forum cannot find such big money.
Then where they will take money to trade. If you have money to trade, just instead of blowing it spend them on education.
You can spend a lot of efforts to fix yourself but for 99% people it would be useless.
So all I suggest if you think I'm not right look the rule # 1 above .
So my second option would be: you have to find a way to make some extra money to spend on psycho.
A lot of people have families. You do not need to tell them that psycho is for trading.
You are fixing yourself to be a better husband, father and create opportunity for future (and it's true, it's not a lie).
Make sure it will not hurt your family financially
At the same time you are working with psycho you should educate yourself on a market.
This step is coming.
It's a hard one for me.
When I did my immigration I stick to an immigration forum from my community. It was a great source of information. I found friends and I knew what to expect when I come to foreign country.
This site is a great source of information. The problem is that not everyone can see that.
Human beings only see what they want to see. The same with listening. They listen what they want to listen.
There is no an universal methodology that works for everyone.
The guy who makes money with his method can easily fail adapting a profitable method of another guy.
You should understand your nature to choose what suit you more: technical analysis, fundamental analysis, mix of both or something else. Only you who knows this answer.
Saying that I can assure you that a shrink can answer this question for you when he knows you better.
Read books, news, educate yourself on indicators (economic, technical). Learn about both. Do not try to stick to anything at the beginning.
Just learn things. In few months you will start to understand things. It will be only improving with a time.
In few months, you can try Sim trading. Than take a break. Think about it. Try again Sim. Take a break again.
Ask questions on a forum, do not afraid to ask. Even try to answerl questions and see what people can say about that. The reward will come.
From a psychic prospective to check yourself:
If you can easy overcome your worst habit I would say you are ready.
Say you are smoking. If you quit next day and do not start again you are ready.
You are overweight. You can fix that in 2-3 weeks and not gain again you are ready.
On a market.
You stick to your method.
If on news a guy explained you why it will go down or up. You said it's bullshit your explanation and it did not do what a guy said, you are ready.
If you have your own opinion and you are watching for confirmation and it goes the way according to your opinion you are ready.
Traders don't fail because they trade on emotions, they fail because they have no clue how the market works. True, emotions can lead to you have a bad day or a bad week, but if you know what you are doing, that's not an issue. Just like a pro Poker player or athlete, they will always have one of those days where they go on tilt and have a bad game, but the skills there, the knowledge is there and they will eventually recover.
I too, for many years thought that my issue for my poor trading results was due market psychology. (e.g. afraid to take the next trade after a few stop outs, not having the correct mindset to take draw downs and all that good stuff). And I accepted the fact that psychology does play an important role in trading success, BUT I also was very certain that even though I was not in the right ZEN, ZONE, frame of mind or whatever you want to call it... my results couldn't suck that bad still. Look at people like Tiger Woods for example... even after all the scandals surfaced, true his game suffered, but he was still able to make somewhat of a come back. Because he KNEW how to play freaking golf.
Heck, at one point in time I even believed that it had something to do with Karma and I started donating to charity and did yoga and all that other good stuff... But, it's got absolutely nothing to do with all that. You can be one hell of a bad arse, but if you know how to trade, you'll make money. True, maybe your health won't be good, or maybe you won't have any friends... but oh yeah, you'll still make money trading.
And then the famous quote which I see a lot of is the 10,000 hrs. And so people here like to say you need screen time, but screen time is useless if you don't know what you are looking at, or looking at the wrong thing. If every day you are just staring at your indicators, support levels and looking at the candle sticks, it's pretty much useless, and you can look at it for 10 years and still have no clue.
So, instead of going to a psychologist to straighten out your mind, I think more important is to find someone who's actually successful at trading and then pay him an hourly fee just to sit there and freaking watch him trade.
This is of course easier said than done, because it seems like no one dares to offer this simple yet straight foward service. No, instead what you get out there is just a whole bunch of people hiding behind YouTube videos, showing you way after the fact trades and paddling Webinar after Webinar after Webinar. Live trading rooms, and chat rooms for the most part are worthless as well because the guy's not trading live... he's just rambling on about a bunch of nonsense about the market conditions and posting some P/L statement at the end of the day, and people seem to get a kick out of being able to voice their opinion about the market and get a response, or brag about the occasional winning trade they bagged, perhaps this is due to the solitary nature of trading... who knows.....
I would say that learning to play Poker is even easier than trading, because at least you can sit at the same table as a Pro for hours and observe the way he bets and make his reads. Your tuition fee will simply be the money that you lose to him... Even in other sports like Boxing... if you get into the ring with Floyd Mayweather, and he knocks the out of you, you're going to learn something valuable. In trading, there are no such opportunities.
Again, people say but you can learn from all your losses.. I disagree because this comes down to you had no idea what you are doing in the first place, so what's there to learn? You can learn however, from the losses of a "real successful" trader. Those you can learn.... but your own dumb trades? No, nothing to learn from....
Trading is a tough business, and there are just too too to much misinformation out there.
So I guess, after all that talking, I just want to say that yes, psychology and being one with the universe and all that good stuff IS important, but ONLY after you know what the heck this shell game is all about, and how it's being played. Not the other way around.
It's strange. You disagreed with me at the beginning but confirmed everything what I said at the end .
The psychology and learning the market is the key thing. That's exactly what I said in my posts above.
You mentioned you know the markets. What do you mean? Do you see a big picture or you know how your order has been routed? Do you know what each player does on a market inluding central banks? Do you understand what market makers will be doing during a day to load/unload treir inventory. I'm trying to understand what do you mean under "know the market"
.
