08 Nov Why am I not a successful trader yet?

Why am I not a successful trader yet?

After blow­ing up anoth­er 10K account (luck­i­ly a demo account) I thought it was about time to start rant­i­ng again. About the things that aren’t going too well. Also, stand still by the things that are going well. Let me start with the bad things first. 

The Bad

I recent­ly had an epiphany. ‘Just because you can con­nect the dots, doesn’t mean there’s a link.’ Now this sounds triv­ial I know. I was think­ing about some­thing per­son­al when I came to this real­iza­tion. I’m prob­a­bly more para­noid-inclined than most, but I’m sure I’m not one of only few. How often do we see peo­ple doing ‘inno­cent-look­ing’ things think­ing they are up to no good. Only to find out lat­er that there actu­al­ly was noth­ing going on. Now, if you had jumped the gun and con­front­ed this per­son you’d look like a jerk, right?! I think sim­i­lar things can hap­pen when we look at oth­er pieces of infor­ma­tion. Infor­ma­tion like the news and how we think we can con­nect cer­tain dots and ‘see’ links that prob­a­bly aren’t there. Talk­ing to you con­spir­a­cy nuts! Just kid­ding. I have a ten­den­cy to do the same. I believe it’s always good to ask ques­tions. Just when you start cre­at­ing your own answers to fill in the gaps and think you ‘see’ a link there. That’s when you get a lit­tle nuts. Can we be so mature to acknowl­edge that? What does this got to do with trad­ing? Well… Just because I see pat­terns doesn’t mean they are there. I think by over­think­ing trad­ing too much I cre­ate obsta­cles for myself. And who needs obsta­cles when try­ing to tack­le a com­plex finan­cial ‘game’ as trad­ing. It’s just that my per­son­al incli­na­tion is to basi­cal­ly rein­vent the wheel. Or even redesign it think­ing I’m that good. Now there’s def­i­nite­ly some­thing good to be said about that as well, name­ly to not let oth­er people’s opin­ions weigh so much. On the oth­er side I am cre­at­ing extra work for myself and that can get con­fus­ing real fast. My intu­ition tells me to keep things sim­ple so that is what I’m going to do. 

The ugly

Now, even if I keep con­nect­ing these dots and cre­at­ing irrel­e­vant links it would still mean ‘more’ if I would stick to the plan. I would have to keep trad­ing the same plan to be con­sis­tent at least in find­ing out it doesn’t work. Fol­low­ing my trad­ing plan is my biggest chal­lenge. I have set rules for myself and I need to fol­low them. Be more method­i­cal in my approach and not let the sud­den burst of price action excite me into pre­ma­ture­ly (ejac­u­lat­ing over my key­board) tak­ing trades. I have to keep a cool head and ONLY trade my plan. 

The good

It’s not all bad over here. I can feel myself evolv­ing from a begin­ner to a novice. See­ing the things you do wrong is the first step to fix­ing them. So that’s what I will keep work­ing on. A friend once told me ‘Progress, not Per­fec­tion’ and I believe these words to be very pow­er­ful. Often times I find myself want­i­ng too much, too fast. Although I know that it will come with just being dili­gent in my approach to find the mis­takes in my ‘game’ and then to bet­ter them. I am cer­tain I will become a suc­cess in trad­ing, because I am putting in the time and ener­gy. It’s that simple. 

Thanks for reading

I hope that in some way I con­tribute to your jour­ney to become a suc­cess­ful trad­er. Thanks for read­ing and please leave a com­ment and/or sub­scribe. Let me know what you think and where you are in your journey.