How to become a successful trader?

Practice makes perfect.
First of all, you need to realise that trading presupposes constant learning and constant improving. THe first thing you need to learn is the financial instrument that you intend to trade, because every instrument has its own pecularities and specialties. Like stocks and currency pairs behave differently at the same situations, for example. The nesxt thing is money and risk management. Market is too unpredictable and every sensible trader understands that they are highly unlikely to reach 100% success. That is why traders follow the principles of money and risk management in order not to loose everything at once and to understand and hedge the risks associated with the certain deals. It goes without saying, that you need to learn technical analysis, i.e. chart analysis, also fundamental analysis will be of great help to your trading results. Finally, train your psychology. From my perspective, the best way to avoid negative impact of emotions on trading is to create an accurate and strict trading strategy. This will help you to concentrate on the facts and forget about emotions, like you don't feel any emotions when you know that 2+2=4. The trading strategy should be as simple and accurate as this. It is hard to do, but you should aspire to that.
 
In a nutshell, it is quite ordinary: work hard and never give up.
It takes a great deal of time and efforts in order to become a success in forex. You've to learn a lot about economics in order to understand the interconnections between different events and prices, you should also now hot the prices are formed and the financial instruments that you will trade. This all needs your time and your mental efforts to be absorbed and understood, otherwise, you are highly likely to blow your budget once and forever.
You will have moments of total depression and dispair when you lose huge sums of money during a trading session. Everybody has such moments in their career and some of the people come back to forex and keep going while others give it up and return to the old jobs.
Trading is like any other profession which requires certain expertise in order to be a success.
 
KCalhoun said:
In working with tens of thousands of traders over 20 years I found these simple truths:

You guys undertrade large size with much more expensive stop-loss cost than needed, and do so on marginal setups.

It is much smarter to take 10 $100 stop losses than one $1,000 stop loss. Understand that completely and it can make a big difference in your trading, potentially.

Also, range and price action are everything, along with trade management. Look to trade the outliers, the corners, not the common.

A word on over versus under trading. You need to look at trading like a game of Pac-man in which you're eating a lot of dots, not making a single big trading decision like going to a buffet. The law of large numbers needs to work for you, and it can't if you're not giving yourself enough chances to make winning trades. I'm perfectly fine doing 200 trades in a week of which 150 might be stops and 50 wins, as long as the profit from the wins outdoes the cost of stops.

Back in the 90s I would trade larger size infrequently and it would be like I'm about to make a big trading decision, drum roll. Nowadays I look at any trade as though it were the next of the next ten thousand and I genuinely don't care about how any single trade works out, instead I look at a week's worth of trades at a time. If you worry about any single trade, that means that you're trading too much size.
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TRADING SMALL and more often only makes sense if you have an edge............most beginners do not have that so if they trade more they will lose but more slowly.
 
I would say you should start by reading the Market Wizards books and start to explore what style of trading fits your personality and resonates with you as a trading philosophy. One thing you'll notice while reading those books is that each trader has developed a different trading style, but it fits their personality.

You have to consider aggressiveness vs. cautiousness, high win rate and low profit factor or low win rate and high profit factor, frequency of trading, asset class, technical vs. fundamental, etc. Trading typically takes a long period of exploration to find what works for you, then you can begin the process of mastery in trading.
 
padutrader said:
TRADING SMALL and more often only makes sense if you have an edge............most beginners do not have that so if they trade more they will lose but more slowly.
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But you do not trade period, so why are you commenting? Since you do not trade, you are giving advice.
 
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