Ted Williams said the hardest thing in all of sports was to hit a baseball.
I think there is some truth in that, but since Williams was nearly unparalleled as a hitter, the statement was also self-serving.
I played D1 baseball and would have loved to have been a professional, but I understood that it was not the difficulty of hitting a baseball that would keep me out of the majors, but my physical construction, no matter how much I worked I did not have the natural hand eye coordination to make my living playing professional baseball.
Trading is difficult. Friends and acquaintances often ask me what it takes to trade. Besides something called capital, I always tell them not many people can trade because they are not psychologically constructed to trade.
I will not say that trading ever came easy, but I knew very quickly that trading was something that I was naturally good at.
When I made more money trading part-time than I made from a profession for which I had invested a graduate education in, as well as a couple of decades of my life, I then knew it was time to take a bigger risk than I ever took with the money that I put in the market.
I stepped away from a career from I which I could probably NEVER re-enter at the level that I left, if at all.
It takes a certain psychological construction to take that risk as well as the daily routine risks involving what is a HUGE amount of money to most average folk.
When people obsess about how difficult trading is, I often wonder if they think trading for a living is something anyone can do, if they work hard enough.
I think trading for a living requires more than the desire and effort to overcome the difficulty involved with profitable trading.
It requires some things which are inherent to one's nature.
As I knew I did not have the physical requirements to make a living playing baseball, I was just as confident that I had the psychological requirements to trade for a living, so I confident that I stepped away from my professional career to test my belief.
Yes, trading is difficult. But frankly, I do not like to go around saying how difficult trading is, because it looks very self-serving to say it, when one is in fact doing very well at it.
If a profitable trader joins the how difficult trading is Greek chorus, then I think he is being self-serving in doing so.
And one thing that I am certain of, there is no place in the character of the profitable trader for ego and arrogance, the market can and will humble you in a nano second the instant that you accept your profitability with anything other than extreme humility.