Quote from darkhorse:
Though I would also argue one can find a balance between the two, e.g., have a deep-seated passion for markets, but also an ability to step away, have a life etcetera.
Macro and deep value are two strategies particularly well suited to this. At a certain point in one's career, the ability to "step back" or "dial it down" is fairly easy, given long stretches of market calm / quietude, with the ability to then "step back in" in a major way when significant opportunity sets develop (as they tend to do two or three times a year, and / or once every few years for the grand slam opportunities, from a macro / deep value perspective).
The admission cost to such approaches though, is a very long apprenticeship (on the order of 10-15 years or more) to gain the requisite capitalization and experience.
But this also serves to give a wider palate of late-in-life options: If you get set serious at, say, age 35 (if not earlier), by age 55 you have the opportunity to be 1) chillin' like a villain, 2) getting more out of your trading and investing than ever before, or 3) some happy combination of the two.
Now that I'm 12 years into my trading career, I can look back and see that it really does take 10ish years to become a true polished veteran. Before that time I would disagree, because I did not know the difference and quite frankly couldn't see the difference.
This trading career path like any other takes a long time to perfect, because one needs to master both the task at hand and master one's own self-management, too. No different than any master craftsman, a musician, a pro athlete, a top chef or any other performance based profession. It takes a long time to get real good and handle every situation that comes your way.
Some guys who make it to the finish line of consistently profitable want to keep pressing forward. Others look back down the long & winding road from where they came, are content to idle back and create a very comfortable living for themselves with least possible stress involved.
I've said this many times before and often get poo-pooed for it... but here goes: if/when a trader reaches a point where they can regularly book +50 cents CL daily ten sessions out of twenty, when they can regularly book +5pts ES ten sessions out of twenty and trade a handful of contracts respectively, we're talking a very solid six-figure annual income.
Most traders who hear that are not even profitable now to begin with, yet they dismiss such talk as "underperformance". Instead they think, "heck with that, Joe Schmoe in this or that message board thread nails every turn in the ES or 6E or whatever... he NEVER has a losing day. I wanna be like that guy... a real rock star trader"
So the self-imposed pressure to perform is ridiculously high, set by false premises that aren't even real to begin with. That imo is a real and tragic disservice to countless fledgling traders.
Instead, if a guy merely focused on catching one or two textbook trades that profit and quit for the day, they would purposely avoid the give-take-give-take-give emotional roller coaster which claims so many trader lives.
Most people out there ready to trade tomorrow could live like royalty on $120,000 per year. Heck, they've lived on half that or way less from their jobs and careers already. Yet most aspiring traders think they have to be the next Paul Rotter or they failed miserably.
