📈 Where did you learn to trade?
Today I have an itch to write and also I recall a question that people often ask me. Where did you learn to trade?
I started, like many others, with courses, but they rather helped to find like-minded people, colleagues and comrades in trading. There were difficult periods when I was thrown for money in 2013, later I became more experienced)). I comprehended everything in practice and I think that I learned all the main things myself (from the market).
I still think that you can figure it out on your own, but for this you need to constantly practice and develop skills + it is very important to build effective time management.
From all this, I have learned a number of points. What kind?
- It is very difficult for a professional trader to develop as a professional trader while sitting at home in shorts in a familiar environment, or at work, when colleagues are running around behind your back and looking at the monitor. Why? Because trading is, first of all, a profession that requires a lot of study and enough time to devote. And such an attitude, when you sit at home or at work, you get paid for one thing, and you do another, it makes you very much either relaxed or, on the contrary, annoys you. That is, you do not focus, you have defocused attention, and the conscience presses on you that you are getting money just like that.
💡 Suppose you are a programmer, you are paid for what you program, but you do not program, you dodge it, but it seems like you do it .. it is very pressing, and in trading there are so many emotions. It turns out that the emotional resource ends, and this all turns out to be a waste of time. You need to be prepared for the fact that you need to devote a lot of time to trading (for example, a year), sit in a prop office with colleagues and trade shoulder to shoulder.
The next moment. It’s very difficult for one. You are stewing in your emotions, you need to have unprecedented self-organization. If you are asked if you are a self-organized and disciplined person, you will easily answer yes! But in fact, 90% of people are not like that, because:
- they do not know technology,
- have already forgotten it.
When you studied at the institute, this is one thing, when you are already 30, you are used to considering yourself a professional, but here you still have to spend a year or several years to study again … what discipline can we talk about ?! The discipline will end after the first month of regular trading, which does not bring you any money, but only nerves and pain, so you need to stop trading alone, and look for groups where you can do it collectively.
The minimum option is chats where you can send signals or exchange ideas, a slightly better option is skype calls and the ideal option is to sit down, rent an office, look for people who trade, for example, in Kiev, sit down next to them and do business together. And this is, accordingly, additional investments, in addition to software and others.
- The third point is the emotional component. Again, when you are trading alone, you dig in your head and don’t notice when you start to tilt. From the outside you can see it — you don’t. There is also a downside — overtrading, when you get pluses and after these pluses on euphoria you also make extra deals.
💡 When you sit in a team of several people, you control your neighbor, and seeing how you do this, you can control yourself, and the neighbor, accordingly, can control you. All emotions will be written on your face. You can take a break, talk to a colleague, and this is very strong psychologically!
- The fourth point that I understood is that the basis is psychology. The system is not really important. You can trade level breakouts, you can trade pullbacks, you can trade a three-bar reversal or something else, but the main thing is: a) that you believe in this system and b) again control your emotions.
💡 Belief in the system is a certain state and you need to either look for these states yourself, or learn to build or evoke. That is why they say that you cannot trade when tired and sick, because you are already in the wrong state from the beginning. It’s like starting a hundred-meter race 20 meters from the starting line. You are not a robot and there is a high probability that when you are in a bad state, you make wrong trades, you can miss the moment of entry, and every second is important there.
- And the fifth point, which I would like to talk about today, is the savings at the entrance. Unfortunately, when a newbie comes in, he first tries some water with his feet, he saves on everything, tries to repeat after the coach or the guys who are sitting in a group whom he trusts or believes in what they are doing.
But, often a beginner tries to repeat everything partially, keeping in his head the fact that “I’m a beginner today, I’m just trying, so I will do this, but I will not”, etc. While the guru he is looking at arrives at work at 14:00, this one comes running at 16:15 (just before opening). Accordingly, these are two completely different states, here it is necessary to compensate.
👆 You need to notice the details, up to the time at which the person from whom you take an example is having lunch, what software he uses, how many monitors he has, etc. All this must be copied and you have to pay money for it .. and it is not clear where you can save and where you cannot.
And even saying that the ideal option is to copy, it would still be wrong.
It is more correct, but still, less than an ideal option. That’s said, the minimum required is to copy everything starting from the software.
Does the person you look up to use Sterling? So you should use Sterling too. 3 monitors? This means you should have 3 monitors. Lunch at 14:00? This means that you must rebuild the regime and dine at the same time. For example, I changed my lunch for 2 weeks, until I came and still have lunch at the same time. If earlier I had lunch at 12 and had time to get hungry by 16:30, now at 14:30 and this is optimal for me.
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