About 5 years ago I started with the illusion of getting rich quick and easy.
“Work a maximum of two hours a day and earn the equivalent of your monthly salary in two hours!”..
This is what the advertising usually says. Today I believe, and I am almost certain that many, too many, of us have started down this path with the wrong reasons and the wrong beliefs about what this business is all about. We put our focus on the bottom line, and that, in my point of view, is a mistake. In trading and in any area of our life.
Trading is a business of probabilities and for that reason we need a large enough sample of operations to have reliable statistics that allow us to make better decisions.
We can’t only focus on the results. If in a week we do not end up with a positive balance, a common behavior ist to change our way of trading. We take different trades, we miss opportunities, we close trades because of fear, we trade thinking about the previous result and this implies that our statistical samples will never have the necessary bases to achieve consistency.
If in two or three months we don’t see ourselves as winners, we think that our academy, or wherever we learned, isn’t good and we blame our mentor for our own mistakes.
Now this is not in the spirit of criticizing advertising or trading academies, which are always debatable issues. What matters here is that, as traders we should take more responsibility for what is in our control and recognizing with more frecuency our actions.
I would like to share with you some key points that has personally worked very well for me and I read it in the book "The Disciplined Trader" by Mark Douglas, as well as the many times that one of my mentors has repeated them to me:
- Specialize in a single type of market. Be it Futures, Stocks, Options, Forex, etc...
- Specialize in a single Pattern.
- A single transaction per day is enough, whether it is a winner or a loser.
- Be patient. Give the strategy time to gain experience, confidence and a large enough sample of data to make informed decisions.
In addition to making you better at this business, the key is to focus on the process of becoming a Professional Trader, which will make you a better version of yourself as well.
