YOU’LL MAKE FEWER MISTAKES AS A BEGINNER TRADER IF YOU READ THIS!
It’s easy for new traders to get excited about jumping into trades while starting out their trading journey. “After all, I have the capital; I could just throw it in and make a few bucks daily”. They’re eager to click on a buy button, watch it move up so they can take profit. Isn’t that just what these traders do on their screens daily?
Sorry to burst your bubble dear - the financial markets can be very tricky. They are anything else but simple. It won’t matter one bit if you aced maths in high school or have it as a Bachelors's degree. If you truly want to be a successful trader, you’ll go through the painful and exhausting periods triggered by the market’s abrupt movements.
I’ll tell you some tips that will help you from the start:
You don’t have to make profit trading daily: the market will not give you room to take away profit every day. If you treat it like selling food in a restaurant, you’ll surely have days when you’re forced to throw away some left-over. While the market gives room for profits daily, you just cannot be in the right position every time you have available trade capital. Remember, you can’t have eyes on every pair, enough to pick out good set-ups daily. For this, much emphasis is laid on having a trading plan. Waking up every day to enter trades without planning it through will have you willingly giving away to the “ever-ready-to-devour” markets.
That one-off good trade was just a flash in the pan: ever heard of the beginner’s luck? Sh*t occurs almost in everything. A few winning trades at the beginning doesn’t make you a guru. You were just in the right place at the right time – a little more than once perhaps. But the idea isn’t to make one-off profits, but to create a strategy that will help you have bigger “percentage” win ratios.
That way you can build a solid income stream that will ultimately lead to financial freedom.
Keep a journal: this one usually sounds boring to execute but has one of the greatest effects. It’s akin to penning down how you spent every dime you earned. The moment you track your trades, chances are you’ll find out you weren’t following your rules. Either you tweaked your stop-loss, sold too early, got in too early or too late. If you begin to note them down, it’ll become clearer what you need to do in subsequent trades.
There’s no expert in here, my friend: many factors affect trading that you’ll never do enough to call yourself an expert. The market is way too complex and will humble you, no matter who you are. There’s too much information to keep track of, a couple of factors you might discover only in hindsight. There’s always something new to learn daily. This is why experienced traders refer to themselves as students of the market.
The goal shouldn’t be to wear the name tag “expert”, but to learn and experience enough to make you proudly call yourself a successful trader.
Trading, for me, is like passing through life, where you’re not 100% sure what tomorrow will bring, however you come prepared!