Risk for OP is that trading may never materialize to be a successful business adventure. So far I haven't seen any strong indication that he is even close. He is close to the 10-20 year of experience. And it sound like he is still in the development state.
As an even keeled rational person, what you said is fair. I wouldn't say I have 20 yrs of trading experience! I daytraded a little bit back in my prop days. Then I went back to Corporate America since then. There were long periods of many years where I did NO trading at all. Didn't follow markets. Didn't read about trading. Then a little in 2010/2011. Then again more actively since October 2015. So there were 3 distinct periods of active trading that last a few years each. So over the last 20 years, I might had a total of 6 years of "active" trading. Some of it was daytrade some of it was swing trading. It wasn't like I had 6 full years of screen time of daytrading.
Having said all of that, you are right about the development state. I was repeating the same mistakes and biases for a long time. Called it insanity/bad habits or whatever.
But nowadays, it's a new day. Definitely feels very different. I would say it wasn't until about a month ago that I was able to get rid of many of the bad behavioral and cognitive biases I had about markets and trading.
This fundamental shift also coincide with my new discipline about getting up early every single morning to do cardio, or yoga, or strength training. This exercise discipline and consistency seem to have a fundamental shift in making my good trading habits stable and prevalent.
The big 3 hurdles I achieved in the last month or so:
1) Got rid of countertrend bias. Stop shorting rising markets and stop long falling markets
2) Cutting losses faster
3) My biggest breakthrough is being able to distinguish between a countertrend trade and a REVERSAL trade. That is I know when a reversal is emerging and go reverse rather than blindly countertrend trading. It helped me this morning. Reversal trades have better odds than countertrend trades. I even smiled now when I see where I would countertrend and get killed in the past. I recognize it and don't enter that spot.
This is the tradeoff for the OP. The time he is spending on trading could have been used to invest in other business venture. Maybe even personal ones. Trading is not that interesting unless you're making money
This is a very fair opportunity cost question. Given my education credentials, skills, and professional experience, looking at pure ROI perspective trading has been vastly negative experience up to now. To address that opportunity cost question, I'm currently pursuing several non-trading business ventures in addition to my non-trading biz I've discussed here. They are in the works and utilize other more obvious talents and skills I have. My days are highly scheduled, productive, and optimized. Strangely enough, I don't feel stressed about it. I feel a sense of contentment that I'm using my time on this earth productively. And I don't work any more hours than before. Just more efficient and producing more results.
Given recent improvements, I think I'll probably make more progress in the next year than all the prior years experience COMBINED. Because there's a fundamental shift in thinking and seeing of markets.
@Xela wrote, "Again, that's not my own perspective, to be honest; I actually found the long learning process more "interesting", in most senses of the word, and the eventual outcome of doing the activity repeatedly for a living almost boring, by comparison. Trading is relatively easy, after all: it's learning how to do it in a stable, reliable, successful way that's the huge hurdle (for almost everyone, I think?)."
I agree and really appreciate
@Xela perspective and support here. The actual mechanics of trading is rather simple and boring. Once you have an edge, you just execute it day in , day out. In fact, on days when I do well because the market unfolds exactly in the patterns that I expected, then there's almost nothing to do. Just sit back and execute in and out. It's almost boring.
But it is the training to obtain mastery that's "interesting". You should strive to learn trading in the most stable and least damaging fashion. Maybe a lot of people here on ET are single male and have not many financial obligations. If you have a mortgage and family then learning to trade and relying trading as your sole source of income would be exremely stressful and damaging to the learning process.
It takes time to master anything. And mastery is a continuous process. Kind of like George Leonard's concept in his book on Mastery here:
No one strategy will last forever. So one has to constantly develop and observe new patterns and add them in one's toolkit. In the long run, I'll try to automate so that I can work and trade at the same time. Maximize both opportunity sets.
In meantime, a full-time consulting/job is the easiest six figure source of income. This is the concept from Steven Pavlina's blog post here:
https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2017/09/easiest-income-stream/
Hopefully soon, trading on the side will be yet another easy source of income.
