I’m writing this on my phone, so I apologize in advance for misspellings and a lack of anything but text.
Let’s start with some background. I first came to this forum back in 2008 just as the financial crisis had hit the global economies.
I, like many others, had a clever plan - use the amazing leverage that was available in retail forex trading to use my, at that time, limited funds and grow them into wealth quickly. Pipe dream calculations clearly showed I’d be a dollar millionaire in just a year or so.
That’s not how it turned out.
The big question that I asked myself for a long time was why I failed to make it. It was basically the first time I hadn’t succeeded as planned. Bragging aside, I knew I was a smart guy, grades and the years in school had showed I placed myself in 95th percentile. Same with dental school, top student etc etc. I know it sounds like bragging, but there’s a reason I’m telling you this.
Did I fail at trading? Well, it depends on how you look at it. What I now think, is that I made most of the beginner mistakes. But I never gave up, simply because I refused to accept that I couldn’t figure trading out.
So there we are, that’s how the first few years were for me, a slow agonizing period of being all over the place, thinking several times I had cracked it, just to be cruelly proven wrong by the markets.
The good news is that I did finally manage to put things together, and hopefully now maybe I can help some of you avoid a few of the mistakes I made.
I don’t know what this thread will become, if anything, we’ll see as we go.
Anyway, the point of this first post is that being a high achiever will not automatically make you a skilled and consistently profitable trader. Trust me, I’ve learned the hard way.
I used to ignore the boring soft stuff about psychology, or if I did read it I would either lie to myself that I was already fine in that departement, or even worse I would even think that such was the case. It was not.
Like someone said; “the most dangerous thing is what you think you know, that just aint so”