Quote from lescor:
If trading is your passion, you will be obsessed with ideas rattling around your head and will delve into trying to figure out problems and test new ideas. It will consume you. It's what's on your mind when you go to bed and what you think about most waking moments. You just have to keep banging away until you have an epiphany of some sort. If it's not in your blood like that, I think you have 2 strikes against you already.
Once you are experienced and comfortable with what you are doing, then it's more like cruise control. But the learning curve can be tortuous. The trick is to last long enough until the light bulb goes on.
Well stated Corey.
To the OP the problem with trading is twofold.
First, there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to win. But will they hold up? There is a lot to be said for the golden handcuffs of a job. Uncertainty is the jedi mind trick of trading. Can you deal with it? Thats why the rewards are so great if you win
Second, your mind (the human mind) seeks perfection and in trading there is none. When you win, You will never buy the low tick. You will never sell the high tick.
And when you lose it seems that as soon as you get out, the market turns around.
If you dont have the passion Corey talks about, the frustration will break you.
The single biggest thing imo to surviving this racket is learning how to take the loss while developing your methodology
Understand this...
Even the greatest running backs in the NFL wear pads. Why? Because they're going to get hit. Hard.
There is no running back so fast, so strong, so agile, that they cant be tackled.
Obvious right?
But believe me, a hard hit trading can be MORE troubling psychologically, emotionally, mentally, and physically than a broken leg playing ball. There is nothing worse than a trader who cannot trade. You cant trade if you're trading scared of losing money. Who has lost more money than Warren Buffet? Who has struck out more than Babe Ruth? Yet you dont remember them for that do you? It's a mind set.
Can you control the loss well enough to allow yourself time to perform?
Dont neglect your family. Or your health. Trading is my life but there is no success without those two things.
What you want is few trades but better set ups. Follow a handful of stocks. Everyday work on a methodology that will allow you to anticipate their movements. Because that is all you can do. Remember there are no gurus and there is certainly no magical indicator that never fails.
Would you rather be "right" or make $ ?
The two are not the same thing.
Good luck.
