#004: I WAS ONCE ONE OF THE MILLIONS OF FOOLS WHO BELIEVED THAT YOU CAN BECOME A SUCCESSFUL TRADER Q
The biggest problem of the trading industry is that it’s, unfortunately, full of dishonest people (mainly brokers and vendors) who constantly feed you with totally unrealistic promises and expectations (just to sell you their products).
An average Joe usually thinks that trading is an easy occupation, where you open a USD 500 FX account and the next week you’ll quit your job. That´s really hilarious! The truth is far from that.
When I started with trading and especially automated trading, I had plenty of false expectations that I’ve had to correct on the way.
The first false expectation was that you can achieve anything in trading quickly. Bullshit!
Trading is a serious business. I even call it entrepreneurship. Indeed, it is a super-serious business to me.
No business in the world starts making stable income overnight (not even drug-dealing).
Despite all the marketing hype and lies, no broker, no trading platform, no trading indicator can result in a shortcut of the experience you need to acquire. If you open any kind of business, the real perspective for the first several years usually is, that you’ll be struggling, fighting, starving, and working many hours for free. Only when you go through this tough period, then there is a chance that your business could really start growing and hopefully make it up to the skies (or whatever your financial goal is).
In trading, it’s the same. Brokers and vendors can promise you anything, but from the very beginning, the probability that you’ll fail is insanely high. You’re working against the smartest, most creative and richest companies in the world. Do you really believe that your chances are high, just because you discovered “a new, fancy, secret indicator on the internet – for USD 500 only”? Get real!
What you really need to become a successful trader is an experience - a lot of it, real experience from real markets in order to go through all the best and worst possible scenarios, to learn what markets are really about and what trading is really about. It’s also necessary to make a lot of errors and then learn from them, figure out a few clever fixes and start over again, until you find the way to succeed. It will take years. And only if you endure and get over all those challenges that you can´t even imagine right now and all those sleepless nights, then you can start thinking if and how you possibly could get to the next level and start making millions of dollars.
This is the very first expectation of any beginner trader that needs to be addressed. I’m quite often an impatient person and I’ve had to learn a lot to be able to keep my expectations within a realistic time limit. Everything takes time, plenty of time. It’s really painful how much time it all takes. I wish things could be faster. I wish the experience that is needed could be acquired faster. But it cannot, unfortunately. So all we can do is remain realistic, make a long-term plan, develop the right daily habits and with both passion and patience move forward in small steps. Like we say in Spain: “Poco a poco”. That is the only true, realistic and sustainable method. It cannot be skipped. There is no shortcut. You might not like it, but I’m really honest with you. I can guarantee it. To become a successful trader, it took me longer than I’d have ever imagined.
Happy Trading!
Tomas
(P.S. These are beautiful dancers I photographed in Indonesia. They are dancing incredibly slowly; sometimes it looks as if they were not moving at all. It really reminded me of my trading beginnings).
