One thing I have realized in trading is that the best teacher you are going to have is the trading experience itself.
You could read the best selling books written by renowned authors yet the chances of committing big errors will still be there.
Big errors that could lead to blowing up your account.
Your experience will make or break your trading career depending on how you evolve.
You either adapt or die, as we always say.
And if you are not willing to learn from your mistake, then this is not the path for you.
One of the reasons why I love to trade the market is that you will never stop learning here. The market will humble you and will teach something new, every single day.
It is a continuous learning process and I think it will always be like that as traders come and go.
You have to find a way to embed grit and perseverance inside your blood streams as you need this to survive in this zero-sum game.
It will also develop your patience and discipline as you progress, where every time you commit mistakes, you will learn from them.
You need to develop patience and discipline. Patience for waiting for the right setups and the discipline to follow your trading rules and plan.
Let me ask you a question: How many of you have already experienced this?
You laid out your best trading plan, summoned all the indicators you like to use to increase your edge and yet screwed the trade in the end.
You could either pull the trigger at the right time; the market gives your target price but at the last minute, you got greedy, left the position overnight only to find out the next day it tanked down only to closed the position at loss.
Or maybe the other way around, the stock rallied, fucking FOMO kicked in, you chased, and the moment your bid got filled, the market pulled back, massive sell off, and instead of respecting your stop loss, you cancelled it, hoping and praying for a small reversal so you can get out somehow and yet didn’t happen. Next thing you know, you’re down -90%.
This is why sticking to your trading plan is a must.
And if you don’t have a plan then don’t trade.
Also, please learn to do your own research.
Though we are self-taught traders, we got helped from trading books already written by successful traders. These books will help you learn and understand the complexity of the market. Start with Volume Price Analysis by Anna Couling. It is a great book. I have read it over and over again.
Don’t be a person who looks for trading ideas in some social media. Learn to hunt for yourself.
The most important thing you need to have is to always check your emotions before you even start to sit at your trading table.
I know it’s hard to trade with no emotion and I keep losing over and over again because of that.
Until one day, I just realized nothing bad will happen if I start trading the amount that I can afford to lose.
That is the source of your fear, the fear of losing the money. Detach yourself from the value of money. Once you start thinking it’s just number where your goal is to increase that number at a certain target amount. Watch how your fear disappear.
If I got emotional at a certain times, I control it by controlling myself. I shut down the platform and I walk away. I take a walk and come back next day. Market will always be there.
Again, the size of the position you will take should be fit to the taste of your risk. Trading with emotions clouds your judgment and once it happens, it will turn ugly. Very ugly. And you don’t want that.
You need to understand yourself above anything first. Find out who you are and then you’ll find the risk you are comfortable with. Just build your risk appetite slowly up, that’s the only way. To be patient with yourself.
If you understand yourself, you will understand the market.
That is how you get better than yesterday. There is no BEST trader in the world. Only better.
TOOLS AND RESOURCES
We wouldn’t be able to execute successful trades without any of these resources and tools. With proper understanding how these tools work, the only question left is when and how you will use these to your advantage.
We use Tradingview Pro Plus for charting and Benzinga Pro for scanning the market.
We have an annual subscription of WSJ, Barron and Market Watch. It’s a bundle package.
Here are the list of trading books that helped us a lot :
- A Complete Guide to Volume Price Analysis by Anna Couling
- The Market Maker’s Edge by Josh Lukeman
- Trading in the Zone by Mark Douglas
- The Disciplined Trader by Mark Douglas
- High Probability Trading by Marcel Link
- Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager
- Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre
- Pit Bull Lessons form Wall Street Champion Day Trader by Martin “Buzzy” Schwartz
- The Complete Turtle Trader by Michael W. Covel
- Technical Analysis of Stock Trends by Robert D. Edwards and John Magee
- The Origin of Financial Crises by George Cooper
There’s a lot of trading books that we have read but in our opinion these list (so far) are the ones that helped us a lot.
If you already read those books, we encourage you to read it again.