Quote from Kovacs:
If you can learn from your mistakes and apply the lessons, it'll be difficult to fail.
For each unprofitable component of your trading method, it'll take a few bad trades before you identify the mistake. Then it'll probably take a few more bad trades as you make the same mistake anyway because you're still rewiring your psychology to apply the new lesson you've discovered.
Eventually, the pain and frustration and introspection from making the same mistake repeatedly will drive you towards doing the right thing. You'll give it a chance and see that it made you money or at least kept you out of a bad trade.
After that, you'll probably go back to making the same mistake a few more times out of impulse, then get frustrated and do the right thing. Eventually, you start doing the right thing more frequently than making the mistake.
This cycle will then repeat with the next poor component of your method.
After a while, when you've been through enough of these cycles, you'll become profitable. If you've kept a trade journal, you can then apply the cycle to aspects which need improvement. Hopefully by this time you'll have so much practice applying new lessons that you won't have to go through the same psychological pain.
Down the line, as you learn more about yourself and the sheer amount of opportunity in the market, you'll probably rehaul your trading method. Your current style yielding a profit factor of ~2.0 will seem painfully naive. You become more aware of how much you don't know, which is a tremendous step. Yes, you'll probably be able to pay your bills by this time, but this is where the real exploration begins because now you have basic exposure and experience with market mechanics and you know the mental games you play with yourself. You know your strengths and weaknesses and what type of trading maximizes the former.
There is only one thing I'm sure of in trading: If you can learn from your mistakes and eventually apply the lessons, you WILL succeed.
