1)You can’t succeed overnight. Most retail/aspiring traders get hooked on trading because they want money and they want it NOW! Over-trading, scalping, over-leveraging, random decisions, greed and the mirage of getting rich quick will turn trading into gambling.

A common sense rule says that – in order to make a lot of money fast, you either 1) steal, 2) you are a genius inventing or discovering something new, something that everyone will use or buy from you (like Google, Facebook, Angry Birds) or 3) gamble, if you are really lucky.

Learn from your own mistakes, don’t repeat them, practice and persevere. It doesn’t matter if you count Elliott waves better than anyone else or if you anticipate a rate hike 6 months in advance. It only matters how you control your emotions and your money.

2) Focus your efforts on the things that work best for you. If there is one trading strategy that works for you, then stick to it as long as it works. Don’t waste time testing everything you find on the Internet and don’t listen to everything you hear or read. Too much information can lead to confusion, difficult choices and failure – eventually.

3)Losing is part of the game but recovering is not an easy task and requires smarter trading decisions.

Have you ever been on a diet?
Common sense rule, again: if you have gained 40 lbs. (18 kg) in 1 year, don’t expect to lose 40 lbs. in 2 weeks. It takes a lot of work to get rid of them.
So if your trading account is down 50% after 2 months, you’ll have to double your remaining equity to break even. Will that be easy? I doubt.

4)Making mistakes is normal but rather than give up, try to learn something from your own trading mistakes, bad strategies, emotions etc.
If you don’t succeed, you aren’t out of the game.

Make a list of things that didn’t work – check it regularly so you don’t forget them. Avoid them in the future.

5)If you keep doing the same thing and you are constantly losing, it’s obvious that you are doing something wrong. Is your trading strategy constantly giving poor results? Change it. Are you always predicting the wrong market direction? Stop predicting – trade what you see, not what you think or expect.

If you want to achieve different results, then you must change your actions.

6)You must know all the dangers of trading. You must be aware that most things in trading don’t work as advertised.

Outperfoming 90% other traders is easy: just don’t take any trades! 🙂

There is only one other participant to your “trading competition”: yourself

7)Don’t spend all your time reading all the trading books you find. Practice is king when it comes to trading. Test different strategies and trading approaches until you find one to suit you.

8)Imagination allows people to apply knowledge. A person lacking imagination wouldn’t know what to do with his knowledge.

A trader has to know at least the basics of trading to imagine them in a different way, combining tools/indicators/data/etc in various and clever ways to discover better trading systems. Both imagination and knowledge are important and imagination without facts is pure fiction. But once you look at the facts, imagination will allow you to reassemble them in a new way. Never stop being inventive!

9)The more information they assimilate, traders tend to see a situation through complicated eyes.

10)If your ultimate goal is to trade full time, you better think more than twice about it. “Trading for a living” became a marketing tool. Many “gurus” are trading for a living, encouraging other people to do so: all they have to do is to buy some books, courses, trading robots then move to Bahamas. It’s THAT simple.

When you have no other source of income and you only rely on speculative gains in the most volatile market, tension will most likely increase dramatically, leading to irrational trading decisions. Never trade money you don’t afford to lose!

This is all for now and I hope it was helpful. Feedback is welcome, post your comments – don’t be shy 🙂