I’ve read some articles and threads about somethings like “to become profitable then you’d need years of practice…” And that kept me wondering why is that exactly ? Why is this the case (Exactly) in Trading ?
What do you think Profitable/Professional Traders have, that the amateurs don’t ? What separate the professional from the amateur ? This question sound a little bit simple or may be stupid. But there are things that only the professionals can (or maybe can’t) explain about what’s different about them.
Screen time ? Lot of experience ? Books ?
Why exactly do you think a lot of screen time helps (I know it helps but I just don’t know exactly why)
I know that this question can be applicable to almost all areas…But I’d like to know the specifics about Trading from the more experienced.
Lots of education based on [I][U]reliable[/U][/I] information as its starting-point (in practice, that does mean textbooks rather than online “information” for the reasons mentioned here, among others).
And a decent understanding of the relevant areas of probability and statistics that all traders need to acquire - one way or another - to become steadily profitable.
Good question, and not trivially easy to answer! I think because only prolonged screen-time can at the same time teach people to “expect the unexpected” while also instilling the benefits and rewards of patience and discipline. Something like that, anyway.
I’d like to know more feedback from your experience. Especially about the Screen time.
I’m still a newbie. Yet when I’m looking at the screen I see a lot of patterns that I really don’t understand…I see things happening over and over again and sometimes even surprises. I still can’t figure out what’s going on in the Market. I’d love to know the gist of it!! What’s really is going on there ?!
I personally, think it boils down to fundementals of trading, and then the Mind set.
If you can log and journal your errors, and then dont do them again, Use stops, Work on Entry, Try as much as possible to reduce Drawdown per trade, and follow even a basic system EXACT, CONSISTENTLY, and have FAITH in your system, it could take you a couple of weeks.
I can tell you right now, I can sit down with someone, and within 15 have them making money, thats no BS.
So, do they need screen time? Do they need to read a book, or books, do they need to sign up for mentorship, Nope. Just follow directions, Mark the checkdown sheet, do what I outline for you, and you’ve been in the business for 15 minutes.
It does make a difference one on one training, but really, you can watch a Utube video, and follow it like they say. ANY system for that fact. Its about following the routine, the rules, and fixing your errors promptly.
I’ve read a lot of your comments in Babypips and I’ve learnt a lot from them…
I understand your points. They make very much sense to me…But I know it can be hard to do the simple things you outlined. It seems easy to just “use Stops, Work on Entries,…” But that needs time for most people to master…
We tend to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.
It’s one of those areas in which I strongly suspect that my personal experience is too idiosyncratic/unusual to be all that helpful to anyone else (so when I answer anything about that, I try to summarise my overall impressions of seeing others learn to trade - some successfully and many unsuccessfully, of course - as well as my own experiences).
I’m Asperger-ish and a bit mathematically obsessed and charts are kind of “my reality”, to some extent (well, charts and shoes, anyway, you know … :8: ).
But I know from someone who trades “aspiring new traders” for a living (institutional traders, I mean, not retail/independents) that screen-time is considered a [U]real[/U] [I]sine qua non[/I], in the industry. Someone with a First in maths and the M.Math higher degree from Cambridge gets nearly as much screen-time as any other new recruit before they’re realistically expected to be able to trade [I]at all[/I].
I do, also.
I see loads that I don’t now [I][U]try[/U][/I] to understand, too.
But the longer I do it for, the more I’m able to identify the ones I’m looking for ([B]after[/B] having learned plenty of “theory” about [U]why[/U] they’re the ones I’m looking for).
And those are what I’m trading from (very literally, in my case, because I happen not to use indicators - though I dare say that people who do are looking for “indicator patterns”, and that there are points of similarity between the activities, anyway.)
Same here … sometimes I feel I “know” what’s happening and where it’s possibly/probably going (though never with certainty, of course, in any individual case: everything’s a probability function … each time I enter a trade, [I][U]I can’t tell[/U][/I] - and fortunately don’t need to - whether it will be a winner or a loser, but I know the [B]collective[/B] outcomes of my next 300 trades, with over 95% statistical confidence, to within a 3% margin of error, and I do need to be able to do that … I needed to be able to do that, or at least something approaching it, [U]before[/U] I started using real money at all.)
LOL - I often don’t, as well. Especially because I have almost no interest in “fundamentals” at all (and don’t want to have to, either).
I learned what I [I][U]think[/U][/I] you’re referring to as “the gist of it” from these few books …
[ul]
[li]Understanding Price Action: Practical Analysis of the 5-Minute Time Frame (Bob Volman)
[/li][li][I]Naked Forex: High-Probability Techniques for Trading Without Indicators[/I] (Alex Nekritin & Walter Peters)
[/li][li][I]Daytrading[/I] (Joe Ross) (this is an updated re-issue of an earlier book - “Trading by the Minute”, I think it was called)
[/li][li][I]Trading The Ross Hook[/I] (Joe Ross) (I keep coming back to this one again and again, because it’s simple and logical and helpful, and the whole concept is based on one of the soundest principles of price action trading, namely “buy the dips in an uptrend and sell the rallies in a downtrend”)
[/li][/ul]
And then later, I learned more about “what to do with the information” from these three, which are kind of badly written and very badly edited (especially considering who the publisher is), and they’re really difficult to plough through, but their content’s [I]excellent[/I] …
[ul]
[li]Trading Price Action Trends - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader (Al Brooks)
[/li][li][I]Trading Price Action Trading Ranges - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader[/I] (Al Brooks)
[/li][li][I]Trading Price Action Reversals - Technical Analysis of Price Charts Bar by Bar for the Serious Trader[/I] (Al Brooks)
[/li][/ul]
“The expression of human emotion and its translation into price movements”, according to former psychiatrist Dr. Alexander Elder, author of [I]Trading for a Living[/I]. I can’t give this book a glowing recommendation, to be honest, but to be fair to him, reading it (which I did before looking at anything else mentioned above) did give me my first understanding that that’s what’s really going on there. :33:
Thats why first and formost, you create a journal that you log every single day. Start by what you think will happen, then log what exactly happened, what you did wrong, what you can work on tomorrow. Tom Dante noted a thing of when you see you do one thing wrong more then once, make a box outline and after you do it 5 times, its time to step back, and fix yourself. Because its YOU that is doing it wrong, nothing else. Only YOU can fix YOUR problems, but if you dont see your problems, Hence writing them down, you cant fix them.
So, really, in therory, yes, we repeat our mistakes, but its really foolish to think you must do them repeativly over and over and over and over again. Im definitly at fault for it also. I guess I was laxy, umongest other problems and life. Plus, it help having a system that works, lol…
But even as an example, following just a 12MA, < or > taking trades, the main point is, following a routine, a good, solid game plan, Preplaning, and writing things down to reflect on later.
Review, Reflect, Resolve… Very important group of words.
You DO NOT need screen time to follow visual asignments such as, Buy when MACD is more the 0, or sell when MACD is less then 0, Or MA crossovers, or Working support and resistance. You know what to look for, you know when to open the trade, you know when to close the trade, its visual assignments, that should be very very easy to follow, without screen time.
Maybe, as far as the platform usage itself, i understand. But to follow a plan, a 5th grader should have very little difficulty doing.
ANd again, its mind set, Whats going on in your life, can you control your time, your phyc factor, your concentration, your surroundings, do you have OCD or add or something like that. ALot plays the factor, but its what you can control. Keeping to the plan, and taking the signals, managing them, and getting set for the next trade.
ABC
The thing to master, is YOURSELF, and of course, Trend direction, lol…
By Losing, By time the trade is in play, by drawdown. Im a scalper, Im supposed to be taking trades at the perfect time. My plan, is to not let a trade run against me after getting in the market. So, if my trade is 9 minutes, Something is wrong, I did something not right. Find the problem. So, Timing, was an issue. We cant be perfect, but we can strive to be. Its not wrong to take a loss, its just wrong to not take the INEVITABLE LOSS When your plan tells you its wrong to begin with.
My other problem, Trend direction. Where is it going, Or more reversal adaptation.
I’m going to address the question of screen time and perhaps get a bit technical doing so.
I coach volleyball. When we train players we talk about the three phases of performing a skill (and this applies to all sports). They are Read, Plan, Execute. When we say “read” we mean collect the various cues which tell you what you’re going to have to do. Much of that reading is unconscious - at least it is once you reach a certain level of experience. Before that, when you’re still in the conscious reading phase, the reading tends to be slow, leading to late decisions and poor execution.
So how do we teach reading? By putting the players in game-like situations over and over and over.
This is what’s called “random” training. Basically, it means even if we’re basically performing the same exercise repeatedly, there’s something about it which differs each time - even if by a very, very small amount. This is compared to what’s called “block” training where you just repeat the same skill execution with no real variation. The former provides a new read opportunity each time while the latter provides little, if any reading.
Here’s an example from basketball. Block practice is shooting the ball over and over from the same spot without moving. You basically read once, then execute however many times you shoot. Random practice would be moving to a new spot before every shot. That means you have to read each time.
Block training tends to be good for short-term skill acquisition (or if you’re doing something with basically no variation like foul shot shooting), but in terms of long-term retention random training is significantly better. This has been documented by research.
Now, you may want to challenge that sports are physical while trading is mental. I would argue back that sports are physical in execution, but everything up to that is mental. Basically, reading is a form of pattern recognition and anticipation. What are we doing in trading? Pattern recognition and anticipation.
In sports, no two game situations or plays are exactly the same. The same is true of the markets, but in both cases they are very often similar to others.
So the more opportunities you give yourself to read the markets - the more screen time - the better you will be at relating the current market situation to similar ones from the past. That’s why you hear people say you need a lot of screen time before you really get competent.
Personally, I think there are two separate issues here:
Why does it take a number of years for a retail trader to become (consistently) profitable, and
what do professional traders have that amateurs don’t.
It is perhaps important to realise that the “forex” world of the private retail trader is an entirely different product/environment when compared to that of the professional institutional trader - but they both require an intelligent approach, professional skills and a lot of experience - but they are world’s apart from each other.
Perhaps an analogy might be:
Amateur: You want to fly. You have played on PC flight simulator games for years and now you take private flying lessons. You earn your licence. You may even buy a 2-seater plane. You are not a professional pilot by any means but it requires a lot of training and knowledge and experience to even get this far - and it takes time, but you fly safely and successfully. You are fulfilling a hobby that interests you and is based on your own capital - and could even lead to some form of commercial earnings.
Professional: You are recruited by a commercial airline. You are trained on professional simulators, you study all kinds of topics like meteorology, navigation, aeronautical engineering, flight control procedures, you fly co-pilot, you then fly as captain, short flights, int’l long-haul, your experience grows. But you are always part of a team and your training is professional and constantly on-going. The input to each and every one of your flights is vast and from a wide range of sources, it is also extremely routine and regulated, your skills are complex and your experience broad, and virtually every single flight reaches its destination - and even when problems do arise you will normally still land safely somewhere even it is not where it was originally intended. You are fulfilling a job that you are paid to do using the assets of the company that employs you- and even includes some performance-related bonus earnings.
It doesn’t take long to be a successful or profitable trader if only you’re a fast learner and are willing to put in the time and effort required to learn what is really required to be one. However, there are traders who are slow learners, and are also busy with other life’s endeavors and only give a little time to trading. For the latter one, it would take some years to be a trader profitable.
Trading is like any other profession that requires a lot of knowledge, skill and attention to detail. You can’t wing it, you can’t trade based on your gut feeling, and you can’t gamble. It’s natural that it takes so long to master.
I understand what you said perfectly. Sport or Trading are both mental. They both require mental work…The physic aspect of sport isn’t everything like most people think. Reading (screening) will differ each time but something will be learned each time even if it’s very small.
Your analogy is very very good. I have a better idea now about how the professional and the amateurs skills differ from each other.
Is there any way one can have the professional training at home ? I mean how to start training and exercising as professionals without being inside/with the institutional traders?
They’re worth either persisting with, or taking a break from them and coming back to them later. He’s the classic example of someone who has great [I]ideas[/I] and [I]analytical skills[/I] but some difficulty communicating them concisely, I think - and his publishers haven’t done him any favours in the editing department, either. If it helps, his video course is much easier and much more approachable (but also much more expensive :rolleyes: ).
