1. Know yourself 2. Know charting like you breath 3. Study Money management before learning how to enter markets. 4. Put more technical effort into back testing. If you do all four first you might not try trading cause it may go against internal personality conflicts, if you are lazy you will fail, if you are not happy doing word problems or Math you will have much trouble, if you don't like games where you have to think 3-4 moves ahead of time you will fail, if money has value-you will be forever nervous, you have to lose concept of value. You have to enjoy working alone. # 1 and 2 most important. Psychology falls under knowing yourself and options under money management among others. And not till you can do #2 extremely well, don't add indicators as they will not make life easier until you know what an indicator should do with price, Mastering the craft of trading will take a decade minimum and for most never. I loved the process much more than the trading, so I been very fortunate, you end up doing 1000 hours of process to 1 hour of the trading half your life. You got to love stats.
...The first step to realize is...you don't really, truly...Know anything, -- that's a rather profound trading thought, if you think about it. Knowing...kind of closes your mind -- While Not knowing...leaves it open,
1. Forget the complexity and psychoanalysis, you'll go crazy. 2. Look for the simplest way possible to make consistent profits and build off that. These videos and books are designed to create more losers in the market. Keep watching and reading and you'll go/stay bankrupt. I was watching a Ninja Trader seminar the other day and some salesman was telling the audience of novice traders that he wanted them to be part of a hedge fund and was selling them software that hedge funds use and didnt want anyone to know about. Hilarious.
The major difference between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom is we rationalize decisions made on instinct, and then anchor to those decisions and try to MAKE them work. That's suicide over the long haul. We think individual trades matter, they don't. The reasons why we do what we do are irrelevant. All that matters are our actions over a large series of trades so that probability is our friend.
That would be the holy grail: consistent profits. Sadly only inconsistent profits can be made over the long run.
I saw a great chart of Don Miller's results on his site. He plotted all his losses and wins as dots around a zero line. The frigging thing looked like the plane of a spiral galaxy. His overall profits made that galaxy's centerline slightly in the green, and that was enough to earn him a million dollar year. The other observation was that his profitable outliers far eclipsed his negative outliers, both in number and in size. So I guess you are correct, inconsistent results don't paint a picture until the long run is over.
Not really. Once you develop discipline ...you will naturally put your emotions on hold. It's actually pretty easy to do but takes a few months of hard work.