The most important lesson I’ve learned over the years of trading is staying patient throughout the journey. There will always be loosing trades as well as winning trades, the key is not being greedy as well as staying consistently patient with the market whilst gaining experience.
Re-reading books, trading scripts as well as regularly topping up knowledge of all the relevant price action technicalities is crucial, although I’d say the main attribute to achieving consistent results is not only sticking to your own specific trading plan and rules, but remaining patient and never giving up. The use of repeated trading affirmations can help dramatically with this.
In the world of trading, those who remain patient over the years and ‘slowly but surely’ carve out a positive equity curve will surely gain the vital skills needed to make trading a full time, long term career.
Most traders have only the ‘destination’ in mind, with the ‘journey’ aspect as secondary. This is the wrong approach. Without the long journey testing your patience, including all the difficulties and hurdles, the destination would be too easy to obtain and everyone would be doing it. This is why learning to trade can be seen as easy, however its the journey that most amateur traders find too difficult to sustain. This can all be overcome with the right trading mindset and understanding.
:Anything that comes quick goes quick. Patience is required for outstanding results.
My lessons may have been costly ,but they brought with them a kind of undertstanding more precious than gold.
Many, many times traders are quite conscientious and self-controlled in most areas of their lives, but experience lapses of discipline specific to trading. When this happens, it’s often the case that the trading itself–*how* they’re trading–is artificially creating the failure to follow trading rules. A key culprit in all this is market volatility. Volatility changes from day to day and week to week. It also varies as a function of time of day. Frequently, traders trade a fixed size and set fixed targets and stops, heedless of the underlying market volatility. In a low volatility environment, they fail to hit their targets and get stopped out, criticizing themselves for leaving money on the table. In an environment of enhanced volatility, the market will blow through their stops or exceed their targets, leaving them feeling that they did not trade well. This is especially true when traders find themselves unable to take what is normal heat in an environment of raised volatility. In such cases, it really isn’t a lapse of discipline causing the problem. Rather, the trader is not adapting to market conditions. Adhering to fixed rules in a variable environment is not necessarily a virtue. Changing markets can prevent us from enacting those fixed rules.