I haven’t been doing this long but with each trade I try to pick up knowledge along the way. If you-today could go back and tell you-that-just-started-trading something that you’ve learned along the way and would make your life way easier back when you started, what would it be? (Not talking about a stock that you now know took off…talking about skill-set)
What are the most valuable lessons you have learned?
- Thread starter HuntingBenjamins
- Start date
That it takes at least 5 years to get really good at it and that those 5 years will probably be the worst time of your live.
Make it 10 if you don't have a mentor....and most blow up in year one
Did you define a threshold? One challenge I’ve had is deciding when enough is enough and my two biggest losses the moment I finally bailed they quit dropping. Like within minutes! Then the next day they finally bounced to where if I had waited just a few more minutes they would not have been losses. So my biggest weakness to date is finding that correct exit point for both wins and losses.
I cut my losses where I planned to cut them. What the stock does after that doesn't reall matter to me. The times a stock goes back up are balanced by the times they keep going down.
Over the years the reason I took big losses was because I didn't take small losses.
Heck of a great thought!
What I've learned In 2023 stock will never make a meaningful down move again. Expect a V to every down move. Stocks are way more unstoppable than I ever realized. Like seriously there's no downside risk. V after V after V. So ultimately I've learned that the market is a V machine.
Unfortunately, at least from what i have experienced, there is only one way to learn how to handle these kind of big losses and that's by experiencing them.
That's why it is important to only trade with what you can afford to lose, most will lose when they first start out but that's a crucial part of the learning curve.
- Learning technical edges from institutional traders or veteran professionals, while being very careful with the same old regurgitated retail stuff that can lead one down a rabbit hole
- Understanding how important psychology is
- Accepting that trading is a very difficult profession which takes many years to master
- Running trading as professional business, and not as a hobby
- Knowing when I’m unfit/unwell to trade and that break is needed
Most valuable lesson :
Don't seriously learn from professional writers/talkers.
Because after you seriously learn from them,
you have to decontaminate your mind.
And it will take many many many years to decontaminate it.