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The 10,000 hours rule only applies to very narrow circumstances, and not to private retail trading as one example. As another example, who would possibly believe it takes 10,000 hours to learn to drive a car?

(seems like the less I think, the fewer mistakes I make)

I know the feeling: not a worrier but am prone to over-think problems. When I first started trading forex (I may have posted this before), I took every uptrend long and every downtrend short. I did not attempt to qualify them or filter them, and any sort of entry pattern would do. I could do...

Most new traders make several assumptions when coming into trading, which then go on to almost guarantee, statistically, that they will not survive their first year. Start with the simplest strategy you can find, preferably one that uses no off-chart indicators. Use a low-risk strategy like...

Failing to take profits has been my downfall with numerous strategies. I can't fault the strategies, I usually picked the right target and got the direction right and the entry was most often positive. But so many times I watched profits disappear into the red. Now my rule is to close a...

Yes. I believe every single thing I read on this site. Of course, I don't act on any of it......

You should be thinking in percentages not dollars. Decide the maximum risk in terms of account capital and stick to that percentage no matter how big (or small) your account gets. Focusing on dollars will make you greedy. Focusing on percentages will make you a better trader.

I am running a scatter-gun approach in forex trend-following using only daily charts. This would be very suitable for someone working 9-5, there is no involvement required between consecutive closes. But trend-following has inherent stresses that are unacceptable to many traders. I'm happy...

I never open a trade live, only through a pre-set order - if price reaches a certain level. As I'm long-term trading these are daily highs or lows, which some might call minor support or resistance: either way its a kind of confirmation with a delay in-built, except that it is price-driven, not...

I'm trading mini breakouts in forex that show trend resumption. I'm finding I need to trade all the opportunities - no profit comes from trying to focus in on only the best or lowest risk or highest potential. This means my positions have to have super-small capital risk - about 0.5% would be...

Our education in conventional subjects and our subsequent exposure to the media prevents us seeing what is the real picture. We are educated to seek out the errors in our work and to focus on eliminating them, to identify our weaknesses and work on them, to find the smoking gun and deduce...

I use a similar but less precise approach, with software that lets me colour daily bars - a higher high and higher low prints a blue bar, a lower high and lower low prints red (standard swing bar colour scheme, ignoring opens and closes). This makes it easy to see a red bar appearing in a...

The only strategies which are guaranteed to fail over time are the curve-fitted ones. Which is to say almost all of them. The remaining few may fail on a specific market which has itself materially changed, but continue to work on the others which have not. Trading styles however just respond...

MA's don't work any more? That's a radical statement. What would be the cause of this?

I don't use time stops on running trades, only on entry orders. Some short-term trades need to be opened with a certain market duration or condition ahead, so a late entry would probably not be worth the risk. For example, an entry order for a short-term forex trade set on Thursday afternoon...

The really hard work in a project should be done before it starts. That's when you should bring in the back-up teams and run the over-time total up and develop and resource your Plan B too. Usually in the projects I got involved in, you could only get a bump in resources of you had 3 days to go...

Speed is great for me. I recently got rid of cookies and cache stuff for first time in 2 years - speed was good before and doing this made no noticeable difference. As should be hoped for.

If I was really nasty, I'd be selling signals......

The only way I would pay for signals is if the vendor explained how they were generated. Then I would be able to generate them for myself and stop paying him.

But there's no way to define "hard work". Clearly it isn't physical (unless someone is pulling an 18-hour shift trading forex). It certainly shouldn't be stressful - if you're getting an ulcer from trading, full-time consideration of another endeavour might be in order (or retirement). It might...