This is one of the things that I think people have quite wrong about trading. Their expectations are a little bit different than what reality is. That's got to do with what they see on social media, how things are glorified in movies, what they read about in books. A lot of those things can be true, but they're not effectively the reality for 99% of people, myself included.
For me, trading is something that is extremely serious. The consequences of losing money — and losing money for a sustained period of time — it's not fun. It's not something that anyone ever wants to deal with. So we have to understand what actually working hard as a trader means.
The Work Isn't What You Think It Is
For most people in their profession or how they grew up studying, extra hours in the office, time in the gym, time in the books — those are the things that make you stand out in the real world. But trading is a much different kind of reality.
The work in trading isn't the actual trading part. The trading is effectively how we collect data and how we create new tests for ourselves to improve our skill set. The real work in trading isn't placing trades — it's in studying why you made decisions. It's in studying the market. It's in studying yourself. It's in doing that deep reflection and review where you ultimately uncover the things that are going to get you profitable.
There's no amount of chart time, no amount of trades that you can just take that will magically turn you into a profitable trader. You need to build the habits of profitable trading first, and then you start to make pretty significant money.
The Three Questions That Change Everything
The review part doesn't have to be anything extreme. The way I do it personally is I journal all my trades — entry price, exit price, how I felt, a screenshot of the play so I can go back and visualize it.
After each trading day, I ask myself three key questions:
- What did I do well today? What's one thing I can celebrate about my trading?
- What's one thing I didn't do well? Where did I make a mistake? Where can I be objective in my assessment?
- What's one thing I can focus on tomorrow? What micro change do I think can make a difference?
I find that the process of answering those questions clears the poison out of my head. It removes a lot of the baggage over whether I made money or lost money, and it gives me something technical to focus on. By forcing myself to have that focus, I slow down the market for me and my decision-making processes.
Every Single Trader Loses
Philosophically, as a trader, you're not judged by your win rate. You're not judged by the P&L of a single trade. You're judged by what you make when you decide to stop trading — when you stop trading for a living. That is ultimately the deciding factor on if you're successful or not long term. That's the final scoreboard. Everything else in between is effectively noise.
The more we obsess over our daily P&L, or we need the validation from a number, or we obsess over our win rate, or we choose to compound losses — the smaller that number becomes. That fundamentally means you are a business owner. Every business has expenses, and it is the same for trading.
You're never going to make money on 100% of your plays, so stop looking for that holy grail. It simply does not exist. All you can control is how you react to the market, not what the market does.
There Is No Holy Grail System
There's no combination of indicators, no technique, no amount of skill that you can develop that will solve every single question or answer every single market scenario. Every technique can work, and the ultimate thing that drives consistency in your trading is the quality of your risk management.
My way to trade is one of millions of approaches, and fundamentally it's not the reason why I am a profitable trader. My ability to lose, to lose in control, to be a good loser — that sets me up to be successful long term.
Trading is half art, half science. Each decision is going to be a little bit unique, in the same way that you can have a perfect technique as you paint something, but each one is going to come out just a little bit different.
Why Most Traders Fail
It's not that I've always been a profitable trader. I've made a ton of mistakes. I've failed a ton of evals. I've done a lot of dumb things in my trading career. I blew up the first trading account I ever had access to.
We fail as traders long term when we choose to repeat the mistakes that we get addicted to making. The trader who hasn't changed is the trader who has not chosen to become profitable.
Most of the time, people compound mistakes. They don't take it seriously. They choose to ignore their risk management. They make poor decisions once they're on tilt. They choose not to walk away. They don't set limits for themselves. They choose to ignore strategy and rely on impulse.
A little bit of self-reflection will go a long way. Think back to where you've lost money in the past or the bad habits you've had — you can understand that almost out-of-body experience that occurs once you start breaking those rules and compounding to the downside. That horrible feeling of having lost control. That is the fundamental reason why traders fail.
Why I Trade
For me, the reason I trade is because the second I stepped onto a trading desk when I was 20 years old, it just felt like home. It felt comfortable. It felt like I belonged there.
As I've had more trading experience, as I spent time working institutionally, as I've built out a career as a self-employed trader for the last seven or eight years — trading is totally about freedom. It has been how I have chosen to gamify my self-improvement and unlock tiers of myself that I could only dream about.
Trading will force you to confront your demons. The things that hold you back or slow you down. It's going to attack your greed, your anxiety, your fear — and you're going to have to slay each of those dragons to become the trader that you want to be. That's a lifelong process.
Fall in Love With the Process
The way to accomplish your objectives — whether it's providing for your family, having more control over your time, or beefing up your retirement — is to truly fall in love with the process of improving yourself. Because that has the highest rate of return on any investment you will ever make.
For me, that's what it philosophically means to be a trader. It is the lifelong pursuit of learning. Our trading is simply just a data point along the way.
Start Your Trading Journey the Right Way
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