<i>"I happen to be in the building profession, I am on a job right now that has had more mistakes than I thought possible, lack of focus, dropped details, engineers with no field experience, the list goes on and on.
It has taken me years to get to the point where I am now. There are a bunch of skills needed along the way to competence and once you have the skills then the real work begins, learning how "you" are going to integrate those skills into mastery."
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"I wonder if any of the vendors on this thread could give us some statistics."</i>
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One of my closest friends (Craig) has been a general contractor most of his career. Everything else he did prior now supports = adds to his base of knowledge as a GC.
Craig works for a $5mil annual company which is now a subsidiary of a $50mil custom build = remodel company. His sole role now is to go around and repair all of the mistakes, botches and screw-ups that the subconbtractors leave behind. Every job, every project is beset with mistakes and problems... some are major-league serious.
All this done by sub-contractors who are experienced professionals, employing a continual turnover of laborers. No matter how good the contractor is at his specific role, teaching the laborors to be competent and efficient is an evolution on their part.
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Most people who attempt to learn trading fail. The reasons for that have been rehashed 1,000s of times. Lack of realistic expectations, lack of commitment and lack of self-discipline are three pitfalls of weakness that snare most aspiring traders.
TV ads like the one which show young men trading stocks on a stranger's (hot girl's) laptop in the middle of a marathon race doom traders before they ever begin. Pretty much any TV ad by a stock broker makes it look sexy and effortless to trade stocks.
People expect to find = purchase = invent a mechanical, black & white, mindless approach to trading. Entries, exits and stop managment can all be automated, right?
Perhaps by a very few of the overall population. Most people cannot even begin to create such an approach, for many reasons. Most who do manage to create such a system fail to follow it thru the natural drawdowns and lean times.
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Our profession is very simple. Learn to read market behavior by measuring price action on the chart(s). The learning curve differs for everyone. How long does it take? Well, how long do you give a toddler to walk before giving up on them forever?
Until. You give the toddler all the time necessary until they succeed. Some walk early, some take much longer. Some fall once or twice, some fall for months. Some never even get a scratch, some are bandaged or even hospitalized from falls in the "learning to walk" process.
Ex-floor traders seem to struggle more than any other profession when it comes to retail trading. Everything they learned = did on the floor which worked to facilitate order flow absolutely gets them killed on our side of the screens. Unlearning old tactics and embracing new ones is one helluva tough struggle.
Anyone can learn to trade anything. Their is no barrier to fail for anyone... period. No specific physical limitations exist. Anyone of normal intelligence and maturity levels of self-control can learn to successfully trade.
That said, the personal weaknesses each of us must overcome between first exposure and methodical success can be seemingly impossible to overcome. But it's possible for everyone, no exceptions to that rule if we want success at trading badly enough.
Question is, "How bad do you want it?"
