Saturday, August 28, 2010

It's Really Much More than Staring at the Screen : Become a Trader the Active Way

There is a general myth in trading saying that anyone who stares at a trading screen long enough will start to gain some understanding about the underlying aspects of the market and how to trade it successfully. Many people spend a lot of time going through historical data and trading live demos so that this sort of "eureka moment" kicks in, a moment where finally everything starts to make sense and the person starts to just "see it clearly" and trading becomes an easy thing to do. Sadly trading is not something you can tackle this passively and obviously there are different degrees of success depending on how you face the challenge of becoming a long term profitable trader.

I have to be truthful with you and tell you that time and effort spent alone do not guarantee success in trading and that you could spend a decade trying to learn to excel at this job without achieving your first profitable year. Not only does this depend on the personal aptitude of the individual attempting to learn how to trade but it also depends on the way in which the forex educational challenge is taken. Some traders are exceedingly passive spending their time searching for someone who has developed something they can use to profit or just staring at the screen for days in an attempt to start to get a true understanding of price action.

It is important now to realize that success in trading comes from what you are doing and not from what anyone else in the world does so you should take an approach that exploits your potential and qualities and minimizes the expression of your defects so that learning how to trade can be an easier and a more rewarding thing to do.

When I talk to the few professional traders I know who have walked this road by themselves (from rookie to expert) it becomes obvious that the quickest and most rewarding way to become successful in trading is to do this the active way. This way of approaching trading is based on the building of knowledge from the ground up and the meticulous and careful analysis of trading experiences. When you get a demo or a live account and you start trading it you are acquiring a bunch of information both about yourself and the market and this information goes to waste most of the time as newbies neglect to fully analyze it. New people only like profitable results and the analysis of loses becomes a painful and seemingly unnecessary exercise since the idea most people have is "why focus on something that doesn't work ?".

Being an active trader is not something that requires a huge amount of effort as it requires quite the same - or perhaps even less - effort than the testing of the hundreds of different forum strategies and commercial systems that do not enrich the knowledge of the trader about the market or how to truly become profitable.

Finally what I always advice new traders is to take a very active approach to trading and to learn from every small bit of experience that you get. Keeping a trading journal is a very important part of this and doing statistical long term historical analysis of mechanical and discretionary strategies is also a huge part in the development of adequate expectations and understanding about how trading systems really work and how they can be used towards the success of each trader. Remember that every time you fail to do something because of lack of time/effort someone else will and that someone will reach the spot as a profitable trader you are missing.

Through the next few months I will try to write a series of posts on how an active trader trains and what practical exercise you can do to get yourself closer to a deep understanding of trading and how long term profitability can be achieved. Remember, it is really much more than staring at the screen, it is learning from your mistakes and squeezing all you can from every small trading experience on your way.

If you would like to lean more about getting an education in automated trading to develop your own algorithmic systems with realistic draw down and profit targets please consider joining Asirikuy.com, a website filled with educational videos, trading systems, development and a sound, honest and transparent approach automated trading in general . I hope you enjoyed this article ! :o)

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