Finding Your Trading Path: Beyond the Holy Grail

Most people have bosses who monitor their work output and give them feedback of some sort. In trading, it’s likely just you with a computer, a book, and a dream. We are not used to freedom. You had your parents, your teachers, lecturers of some sort if you did higher education, and finally a boss. Learning to trade is hard, and it’s easy to find means to make it easier, but much of this is just distraction.

In the beginning, you need to learn lots of basics and read widely to get a feeling for the business, but then there is a choice. I never progressed until I picked a method of trading that I felt suited me, and I just did that. By doing that, I could actually progress in learning a skill. It’s easy to style-hop or fall into doing more research because it’s more painful to just do one thing again and again, getting better by tiny degrees.

To win an Olympic medal, you need to be the best in one thing. In trading, to beat the market and make your dream come true, you need to beat the market in one place. But you need to beat it there, and to beat the market constantly, you have to outskill and outwork 99% of the other people in the market. Skipping around styles and ideas means you are not progressing.

If you want to be a swing trader or a scalper, you need to define what that means for you. Then you need to build setups and practice and refine your skill. What you end up with is a place in the market where you have the ability to beat it and take money out of it consistently. After that, it’s how your psychology is, how greedy you are, and how liquid what you’re trading is that will decide your income.