I tell traders what they NEED to hear, not what they WANT to hear. This is one of the things I’m most proud of about how I teach. Learning the truth about what trading is and what it takes to do well at it is the fastest way to become successful at it.
You will have a hard time finding the following five trading tips on other websites or blogs, which is why I am giving them to you here. As I often say, this may not be what you “want” to hear, but it’s what you NEED to hear, and that’s what will help you succeed in trading the fastest.
When you trade, you have to master yourself, not the market.
With so many trading systems and strategies that look fancy, it’s easy to think that the key to trading success is to “master the market.” But in reality, you can’t “master” the market, so the only way to be successful in trading is to “master” yourself.
So, traders spend a lot of time and money looking outside themselves for ways to make money trading when they should be looking inside themselves. Do you need a good way to trade or a good way to trade? Yes, of course, you do. But my point is that the trading method is not the only or even the most important part of trading success, even though most traders seem to focus on it a lot or all of the time.
It may be hard to accept that YOU are the main thing standing between failure and success in the market, but it’s the truth. You won’t make money in the market until you learn to control your own “demons” like greed, fear, and a desire for revenge.
You should learn a trading strategy because you need one, but that’s only one piece of the puzzle. The other “pieces” of the puzzle are in you, not in the market or in a trading robot.
Don’t trade if you want to make money.
Most people get into trading because they want “easy money” and “financial freedom,” but if those things are your “goal,” you won’t succeed.
As I talked about in my recent article about realistic goals for traders, focusing on big, lofty goals like “getting rich” or “quitting my job” is good and ambitious, but it’s not how you reach those goals that matters. So, you can’t trade with these things as your main focus, because if you do, you’ll get the opposite result: you’ll lose money.
I know it sounds like a cliche, but the real truth about trading is that you have to enjoy the process, the game, and the challenge of trading if you want to make money at it. This means that you should enjoy the self-mastery challenge I talked about before, as well as the game of analyzing charts and price action, finding the best places to enter and leave trades, and managing risk properly. To really enjoy these things, you have to be disciplined and patient, and you have to know that this is about mastering yourself, not the market.
You have to change your desire to make money into a desire to trade well and develop good trading habits and routines. You do this by realizing, believing, and acting on the FACT that the way to make money as a trader is to focus on the process, not the money.
Have no memory
Okay, I’ll admit that THIS one is probably the hardest. Sometimes I still find it hard. But if you want to be a trader, you really can’t remember anything. Why do you ask?
The main reason you can’t remember your last trade is that it has no effect on the next one. Now, it’s easy to read that last sentence and understand it, but it’s a whole different thing to put it into practice in the “heat of the moment,” like right after a trade closes out.
Think about this: the market is always changing; it never stays the same. Even with the same trade setup, the market never works out the same way twice. Also, over a certain number of trades, your trading edge or strategy has a random number of winners and losers. Because of these things, you can’t let the results of past trades affect your future trades. This means that just because you took a losing pin bar trade signal, for example, on your last trade doesn’t mean the next one will also be a loser.
When you lose some money, it can be easy to feel down or give up. You might feel like your trading method doesn’t work, so you start to let a trade you lost in the past change how you trade in the future. When you think and act like this, you stop trading with skill, objectivity, and clarity and start trading with confusion, emotion, and frustration.
A trader has an advantage, and for that advantage to work, he or she needs to use it over and over in a lot of trades. No single trade in that series is very important. What is important is that the edge is consistently used (which takes discipline and patience) over a large enough number of trades. You can’t let the results of your past trades affect you emotionally. Instead, you should just forget about them.
Obviously, this only works if you stick to your trading method…
If you are going off track and making too many trades, you should learn from your mistake and try not to do it again. The point is that a losing trade is normal and nothing to get upset about if you’re sticking to your trading plan. You shouldn’t feel happy or sad when you win a trade. Put the last trade out of your mind and stick to your trading plan.
Success will take longer than you think.
Most new traders don’t have a good idea of how long it can take to start consistently making money with trading. If you aren’t in it for the “long-haul,” you will quickly give in to temptations like over-trading and over-leveraging your trading account to try to “speed up” your trading success. But when you act this way, you end up losing money, which puts you further behind where you were and makes trading success seem more and more out of reach.
Most people can’t stay in the market long enough to develop the habits that lead to consistently profitable trading unless they are really interested in trading and everything that goes along with it, as I’ve talked about before in this lesson. If you have a short-term view and think you can “get rich quick” in the market, you will lose money, not make it.
Change and get better to keep making money.
Markets change, and this is the main reason why automated or robotic trading systems don’t work well over time, as I explain in my article on the human mind vs. computers in trading.
If the market is always changing, you need to change to keep up with it. Doing the same thing over and over again will not bring you consistent profits. This is one reason why trading based on price action is such a good idea: it lets you adapt to changing market conditions. When you learn to trade with price action, you don’t have to stick to a set of rules or indicators. Instead, you can read how the market is changing and look for high-probability price patterns that form in those conditions.
You need to get better at reading price action and trading with it. The only way to do this is to get a thorough education on price action trading, some screen time with the method, and a mentor who is willing to answer questions. My price action trading course and members’ community give you all of this and more, so check it out if you want to learn how to adapt to changing market conditions and get on the path to consistent trading success.