The reality of trading

When it comes to trading, so many are attracted to it thanks to social media and so comes a wave of aspiring traders joining the ranks. Many rush in deposit their savings in the hope of getting rich quick, yet the majority of first timers get burned very badly. Then what ensues is a quest for information, trying to find out what works and what doesn’t. Meanwhile the trader spends years and years in this phase, glued to their charts 24 hours a day staring at price action and candlesticks. Then after many years of unsuccessful trading many give up due to natural constraints, time and money are running out. 

Eventually, the trader has a family and staring at charts hours and hours a day is not producing a reliable income. Then pressure adds up to a boiling point, time to face reality and our trader in this example decides to get a 9 – 5 job and bury his dream of being a profitable day trader working from home. Then he goes to work every day early in the morning and comes back at night, on the way during his commute he watches Youtube trading videos and see’s others living the dream life and wonders why can’t that be me. Maybe his destiny is to work a 9 – 5 until the retires at the age 70 or maybe destiny has a different plan. 

This is the true story for most that get into trading and most that embark on this journey find this to be one of the hardest things to achieve success in. Wouldn’t it be better to get a fixed paying job for the next 20 years, that is what most people are taught from a young age to do and are discouraged from pursuing their dreams in trading, saying that it’s some hocus pocus type of way to make money. To achieve success in trading you need patience, determination and grit because the statistics show that 95% of people that attempt to trade lose money over time and end up quitting.

In order to be able to engage financial markets effectively a trader needs to embrace the uncertainty rather than trying to exert control over outcome. It’s perplexing because it seems counterintuitive, the reality is no matter how much technical analysis you do you can never account for the behaviour of other traders participating in the markets.