Quote from gtor514:
For me trading is a full time business.
If you are trading full time in lieu of a career; you may be risking losing a career or the professional development that comes from one. Sitting in front of a computer 12hrs a day staring at charts for a couple of years is not exactly something you want to put on your resume.
If you are trading full time, it IS your career. It's a career that allows a great deal of flexibility and worth staring at charts 12 hours a day for a couple years. If I want to become a doctor I stare at books and computers and sit through lectures for far more than 2 years and when my education is over I'm likely well over $100K in debt. Then I embark on a career full of uncertainty, much like trading. Just as a sudden adverse market event can hurt me as a trader, as a doctor I may be hit by a malpractice lawsuit that results in unsustainable insurance rates. As an engineer, I may be laid off in a recession. As a government worker with a secure well-paying job, the building I work in may be the target of a terrorist attack. As a young promising sports star, an injury may end my career. As an airline pilot, a mechanical malfunction may result in a fatal crash.
Pursue your passion, you only live this life once.
I still believe the most underestimated risk in trading is your own ego, whether it's the inability to accept a loss (to be "wrong") or the inability to have faith in a proven system because you believe you can do much better than the system.
You can pick up one of many excellent books on trading or locate free educational materials on-line and learn how to trade. You'll learn risk management and position sizing, you'll learn to identify high probability price patterns that give you a statistical edge, and you'll learn how to target reasonable profits in relation to your risk and how to take even more when the market is offering it.
Since all this information is available through inexpensive books and on-line for free, how is it possible that the majority of traders fail to become consistently profitable?
What causes a trader to put on a trade before price fully signals the appropriate entry? What causes a trader to chase an entry when s/he misses the entry price that allows for an acceptable risk/reward ratio. What causes a trader to decide to trade without a stop or to trade dangerous size because a setup looks so good? What causes a trader to believe s/he knows when price is too high and is "due" to reverse when the majority of market participants are bidding price higher and s/he has no idea how many additional people will bid the price even higher still because they're afraid they'll miss the move or they have to cover their short position before they blow their account?
The cause of these mistakes is the trader's belief that s/he knows more than the market, the belief that all those market participants are idiots for buying this high (or selling this low), and the belief that s/he knows what's going to happen next.
The key to profitability is to surrender to the market (to the price action), which will carry you along with it most of the time if you allow it to happen, and to surrender to your risk management rules, which means your ego will have to accept being "wrong" at times.
