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What approach did you take to make progress in trading?
Hi first of all sorry for my english, im spanish but learning english now.
Im trading for 2 years but im no profitable in real account now but i owned a lot of skills by losing money.
I think the best skill i owned in this two years are mi psico, yes when i when i start to focus on my psico y start be more consistent and now im profitable in 24 dais operated
Something that has helped me as of late is asking myself whether or not something will help me immediately before I go down a winding path. I'm the kind of guy to buy a used textbook on Amazon to understand the theory of something when I don't always need to go that deep.
Additionally, it is tempting to always learn something new and try new trade strategies instead of just focusing on one strategy and perfecting it. I have recently shifted to price action trading and a part of me is so anxious to read other people's interpretation of Price Action trading outside of my introduction, but I have forced myself to sit down and practice.
I've taken a lot of approaches over the years. What's really helped has been to identify and focus tirelessly on fixing my weaknesses and "c game". It's easy for us to procrastinate that stuff or just focus on our A game (or that indicator we haven't tried yet lol) but without being really honest about our flaws its hard to make any real progress. Honesty is key, I'm here to achieve my wildest dreams, not to just talk about them. I'll do whatever it takes. The pareto principle shows that the top 20% get 80% of the rewards. I think that might be closer to correct for a career like sales, in trading it might be the top 5% get 95% of the rewards.. Ask yourself if you're really working harder and smarter then 95 other guys (or gals) in the room..
The best approach I made so far in my trading journey is saying NO and PROVE it.
For all the traders and vendors that wanted to teach me how to trade or sell me a system for $XX, XXX amount of money and use my time and energy.
I would ask them 1 question. Can i watch you trade for 3 weeks? They said No, so I said No. Anyone selling me system, ok show me your live forward tested trades for 1 year. They said No, so I said no.
I got better when I said to myself, I am not paying noone else to teach me something if they can not prove it. I got rid of the bullshitters.
I kept my money in my pocket, and my eyes on the chart every day, doing it my own way.
There's no substitute for stick time, or in the case of trading, chart time. That chart time needs to be consistent too. I've jumped around from using minute/second charts, to renko, to heiken ashi and finally to tick charts. You need to become intimately familiar with how price moves/works around whatever indicator set you employ in a given chart style. Irrespective of indicators/chart style, everyone is essentially trading the same thing, price action.
Find the chart style that "works best" for how you follow price action. What type of trading are you looking to do? Scalp? Swing? Your indicator set/parameters need to match your trading goals. I'll reveal one thing that I think others will echo, and that is the less indicators the better. Ultimately we're all trading price action. Indicators/algos are there to help you frame price action. Slapping 20 different indicators on a chart is only going to muddle the waters and clutter the screen. The premier focus on your chart should be whatever style charting you employ to represent price.
After you've developed your charting/indicators it's just stick time and preferably live sim trading. Market replay is great, but it doesn't replicate the feel of trading live (sim). You'll figure out pretty quickly if you are able to follow price action. Make small changes when necessary and document them. If you can't explain in a document/journal WHY you have an indicator or WHY you're changing it, you have no basis to either be using or changing it.
The final piece of the puzzle is developing your trading style around the R-value of your trades and working with a mentor. No trader is 100%, very few are 80% and most "good" traders are around the 40-60% level. What that equates to is knowing your leverage ceiling, drawdown and acceptable loss in a trade. Knowing when to cut losses and let winners run. That only comes with stick time, hundreds and thousands of hours looking at a consistent chart. A mentor can accelerate this process and prevent you from going down rabbit holes.
If you follow the above diligently, you will evolve. You will get better. The changes you make to your trading style will be impactful and lower risk. The final tip I'll suggest is looking internally rather than externally for solutions to becoming a profitable trader. Experts, mentors and courses will only take you so far. You need to know YOU and how YOU react to and interpret price action and how you feel during a trade. No one is going to be able to craft that optimal environment/mindset but you.
The question is a bit off-topic, as the issue of vendors came up in this thread only because the OP wanted to be sure that they would not hijack the thread, and my reply, which you quoted, was simply that we would stop them. You can see from the number of deleted posts for vendor self-promotion and banned users that this happens fairly reliably.
If you want to start a thread about webinars and what should be required of the presenters, feel free to do so. But this is not the thread for it.
By the way, many, many more people want to present webinars to the futures io membership, and want to become sponsors too, than get to do so.
@Big Mike makes these decisions, and if you want to address any questions to him, you can do so. Just in an appropriate thread.
Thanks.
Bob.
When one door closes, another opens.
-- Cervantes, Don Quixote
For me, it was a brute force kind of attempt. Within one full year I've probably joined and tried 10+ chat rooms, tried 20+ strategies and traded stocks, futures, forex and options. I felt that in order for me to find my niche I will first need to experience a little bit of everything, otherwise I could only speculate about this strategy or that instrument. 90% of the lessons I learned was through losses. I never saw a loss as anything else but tuition fee. I always learned a valuable lesson from each one. I have notebook full of lessons I've learned from losses. I didn't paper trade a day in my life. I started very small trading 5-10 shares at a time and the micros for futures. I knew that I had no idea what I'm doing, really, so why would I trade with size. But paper trading doesn't teach you anything because you won't feel the pain from real losses. Pain = memorable lessons.
I'm not saying that learning from books or rooms or courses doesn't work but I don't think you can find the one resource and learn everything from it. You gotta pick up nuggets that fit to you and your trading personality from everywhere. Following real traders on Twitter was a big help for me. I asked a ton of questions (and still do) and try to only learn from the best.
Being 100% honest with yourself and have 0 expectations but also not giving up. So many times traders give up and they are so close to figuring it out. Trading is such a vast and complex universe and you have to find your own little corner in it but you won't find it if you don't look everywhere first.
