5/31/2023
My journey in the financial markets started towards the end of 2013, one day sitting at the lunch break room of the office where I picked up a magazine that had an article about the stock market. Soon after, I had ordered on Amazon over a dozen books to skimmed through them and started trading stocks for a full year. At the end of the year, I was at breakeven with a loss under $100. I was over the moon, as I read most beginner traders will inevitably lose money in the early years but I managed to breakeven. Ten years later, I am writing this article as my way of giving back to new traders in hopes that they do not repeat the same mistakes.
2014: -$58 ---------- 2019: -$103
2015: $138 ---------- 2020: -$801
2016: -$734 --------- 2021: $226
2017: -$190 --------- 2022: $687
2018: -$2,535 ------- 2023: -$504 (up until May)
I am currently down in my trading journey $3,370, have spent around $5,580 in numerous trading courses over the years, and have invested $981 in 2023 so far in funding challenges (will talk about funding in much more detailed below.) In ten years, I am down almost $10K and have not seen any type of return on investment (ROI.) At the end of the day, a tree is judged based on the fruit it bears, not its desire to bear fruit. We do need to produce real-life results. This means a trader is judged on consistent performance and withdrawals, it’s that simple. My goal with this forum is to significantly reduce your learning curve in your own trading journey.
After trading stocks (and briefly options), in mid-2015 I learned about FX and decided that the currency market was the trading instrument I wanted to master. I was laser-focused on learning this market until mid-2018 (which included a 7-month deployment overseas where all I did was literally go to work, work-out, and study the charts.) Soon after, I started receiving monthly compensation and trading was no longer my priority.
Most of us get into trading because we hate our jobs and have this belief that trading will replace our income and in the near future actually sustain our lifestyle. Let me tell you this couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is most of us are undercapitalized and have this illusion that we will go from being broke to consistent profitable in a year or two, thanks to the infinite number of successful Instagram traders that did just that and are willing to teach you, all you need to do is buy their $300 course. They are not real traders; they are salespersons selling the dream and you are the one fueling their lifestyle. My suggestion: work on developing skills not related to trading that will let you get a higher paying job to help fund your trading account and/or pay for funding challenges as you work towards your journey of becoming a profitable trader first before even contemplating the idea that trading is the solution to quitting the job you dearly hate. Trading is the only profession where you can do everything right and still not succeed, so it would be wise to develop your skill tree beyond trading to increase the chances of trading success in the future.
For about a year and a half, I was able to pay for my living expenses using my monthly compensation and although I was still trading, I was not obsessed with reaching trading success like I was initially for the simple reason that I had regained my freedom/time back unexpectedly with my compensation instead of my trading. It requires ten thousand hours of work on any particular craft to be in contention for greatness. To put this into perspective, you must spend roughly 20 hours per week/3-4 hours per day for almost a decade to hit this milestone. I simply have not been putting in the work required to succeed. It’s also important to clarify that it’s not just about putting in the work but the correct work, it’s quality over quantity. You will be wasting precious time if the work you are putting in is inapt. I will be discussing shortly the pillars crucial to your development as a trader and what the focus of your ten thousand hours journey should look like.
There are four pillars that a trader must develop and excel in to become consistently profitable. They are: the trading model (the strategy you use in the market), your trading system (the rules you have in place to initiate a trade), trading psychology/mindset, and risk/money management. In 2023, a new pillar was added to the foundation: prop firms/funding challenges. If you are not using these prop firms in 2023, you are doing yourself such a disservice. Now, let’s dive deeper into each pillar.
The Trading Model/Strategy:
In terms of reading charts (technical analysis), you will hear of support and resistance, supply and demand, the trend, liquidity, indicators, candlestick patterns, market structure and the list will go on. It is your job to start doing your diligent research on these topics and putting the pieces together. You do not need to purchase any courses, there is plenty of free information available online for you to digest and begin your development.
Once you start getting the grasp of technical analysis and the way you want to trade the markets, do not fall into the vicious trap of changing strategies every time you have a bad trading week. This cycle will last years and be detrimental to your development if you allow it. Your trading edge is not defined by one or two trades, instead it is defined over a number of trades (20-30). Losing is inevitable in this business, it is how you manage these losses that will define you as a trader. If after 20-30 trades you are in red, this is the time to take a step back and evaluate your trading journal to find the failure and implement a solution, not after one or two trades.
During this time of self-development, you will most likely be digesting a lot of information online. You probably will find a mentor and want to purchase education courses. This is perfectly fine, but make sure the investment will be worth it. If your mentor has a big ego and is constantly bragging how he/she came from nothing to something in a year or two and is always showing off materialistic possessions, I can guarantee you his/her course education is something that can be found free online and is nothing special. For every 1,000 trading mentors, I believe only one will be worth the investment (if that.) Let’s say you found a mentor worth the investment, understand that it still doesn’t guarantee you will be able to replicate his/her success. Out of every 100 students of his/hers, only one or two will successfully implement what he/she has learned. This is due to different human personalities, different trading style capabilities, different risk tolerance and the list goes on. Your personal chart development is crucial to find what works for you. Spend more time on you and less time digesting other traders’ performance.
Don’t make the mistake I made of becoming an excellent hindsight trader. I developed a deep understanding of why things happen in the market (in hindsight) but find myself unable to execute consistently in a live market. Money is made in the live market and one must develop the right skills to be proficient in the live market. In hindsight, it is easy to pick the supply zone that would have worked perfectly out of the 10 zones formed, but in a live market picking this zone is where years of sacrifices will come into play. Finally, you can be the best live trader in the world but if you are weak in the other foundation pillars, you will not succeed.
Your Trading System:
Your trading system correlates with your trading model/strategy. Simply put, your trading system is the rules you have in place to enter a trade based on the trading strategy/unique perspective you have on the market. If A and B happens, I will wait for C to take place before entering a trade. If C does not happen during these specific times, the trade idea is no longer valid. You can’t simply copy another trader’s rules and expect success, the rules are born from the hours and hours you must put in to develop that personal sixth sense to successfully trade the live market (in a way that makes sense for you.) You may use your mentor’s rules as a foundation to begin with, but you must tweak them as you develop and find your preferred/effective method of trading. For example, your mentor can easily hold trades for a RR of 1:3 but you learn that you are most profitable with a RR 1:2 as your trades usually reverse before they hit a 1:3. The goal is to keep your rules simple and not make them so complex that when it is time to execute, you do not become a deer caught in headlights. Once your trading strategy becomes in synch with your trading rules, you’re halfway there.
Trading Psychology/Mindset:
Trading psychology means you understand/accept that it is impossible to win every single trade. You begin to understand that focusing on a few pairs is best, that trading only during a specific set time each day is best, that if you won a trade but did not follow your trading plan/rules it is not beneficial to your overall trading. You develop a real market intuition and begin to understand the importance of discipline and patience in trading. Being discipline to follow your trading plan at all times and having the patience to sit on the sidelines waiting for your A+ setup; if there is no A+ setup (all your rules’ criteria were not activated), there is no trade. You begin to understand that sitting on the sidelines and preserving capital in itself increases your profits/winnings.
Mark Douglas’s book Trading in the Zone and his YouTube video Mark Douglas – Mind Over Matter are a great place to start developing your trading psychology. Remember, it takes time (years) to develop the correct trading mindset. Eventually, you will see your model/strategy presents itself over and over again. However, you need to understand that every trade is different and unique. Take it but execute accordingly each time. Your entries do not need to be perfect, but your execution does regardless of the trade’s outcome. Never marry any of your trades, ever. Once you truly understand that a trade’s outcome is irrelevant and this is a game of probabilities, you have developed a strong trading mindset.
Risk/Money Management:
You can be the best chart reader in the world, have a strong trading mindset, but if you are weak in this pillar, you will ultimately fail. Optimal risk management means small wins, small losses, big wins. You begin to truly understand your win rate and risk:reward formula that works for your trading. You are flexible but you never allow a big loss to start developing, moving your stop-loss in hopes that the trade will reverse back in your favor. We are not in the business of being right all the time, leave your ego elsewhere. We are in the business of making money. Money management is #1 to ensure longevity.
Prop Firm/Funding Challenges:
Funding companies started emerging in 2018-2019 and were full of uncertainty, in many cases traders not receiving payouts and companies ultimately going out of business. Fast-forward to 2023, there are a couple of funding companies established in 2020-2021 that have grown to become reputable and credible over the last 2-3 years, and the return on investment (ROI) opportunities these funding companies offer to a skilled trader are unprecedented. There are many new funding companies that emerge nowadays, but I would stick to the ones that have proven to be credible. The reality is these funding companies are not the solution to your trading if you still have not proven consistency and you must practice excellent risk management to preserve your capital.
The reality is that only 30% of traders will pass the funding challenge and receive their first payout, and even a less percentage of traders will pass and stay funded. Those that pass the challenge usually lose their accounts shortly after and this becomes a vicious cycle of them losing money in the way of them paying for funding challenges repeatedly. This is a win-win business model for these prop firms, majority of traders fail and practice terrible money management and lose their accounts over and over again and for those few traders that are actually consistently profitable, they share a profit split with the company. We don’t know for sure how long these companies will remain around, but I suspect for a long time as they are positive cash-flow businesses and the idea of making money online is ever-growing.
So how do these funding challenges actually work? Let’s say you purchase a $100,000 funding challenge for $600. You must achieve a 10% profit ($10K) in this $100K account (demo) to pass the challenge. After, you are given a live account to trade (or another demo account and a company’s trader will copy your trades as you have proven consistency.) The business model is so lucrative that they might even pay you with the funding fees constantly losing traders pay. Regardless, once you are funded and you make lets say 10% in profits and want to withdraw, usually you will be paid $8,000 and the company keeps $2,000 (20%) in the profit split. So, for the few skilled traders that can pass a challenge and stay funded, the ROI is unlimited and these funding companies are truly revolutionizing the major issue most traders will face: being extremely undercapitalized.
How can you lose your funding challenge/funded account? You must first understand you are not truly in control of $100,000. Instead, you are really only managing the maximum drawdown the company allows. Let’s say it’s 6% ($6,000.) If at any point your balance reaches $94,000 you will lose the account and have to repay the fee to try another challenge. Since you have $100,000 buying power and leverage, if you don’t manage your risk profile efficiently, you will win big and lose big. It’s truly a double-edged sword.
So how do you preserve your account? My suggestion: divide your Maximum Drawdown by 20 or 30. Let’s say you divided by 30, you must now lose $200 per trade idea 30 times in a row to lose your account. As far as leverage goes, let’s say for your $100,000 account you are given a leverage of 10:1. You can trade a 1,000,000 lot or $100 per pip. I suggest only using 1/5th of the leverage offered ($20 in this case.) If you manage your challenge in this manner, you avoid constantly losing your account in a single trade or two as you develop the skills necessary to properly manage the account. And if you become really proficient, you can manage more than one account. The possibilities are endless.
As you can see, for a $600 fee you are given the opportunity to manage X10 the amount of capital essentially risk-free. You can learn to trade without the fear of losing your hard-earned money and work towards becoming a consistent trader and achieving consistent withdrawals. Those that say you’re not a real trader because you’re not trading your own personal account are simply delusional and not taking advantage of the new opportunities in this day and age to help fund their personal accounts faster. Those that say trading with prop firms sucks, there are too many rules, the reality is these rules help you learn to preserve your capital (longevity is the name of the game) and this is exactly how you should be managing your personal account anyways.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to my story, early 2020 I decided to move to a different country where my monthly compensation would go further and I would not have to worry about my finances and would use that to my advantage to focus back on my trading, but this did not happen. Over the last three years, I have instead focused on sightseeing the country and being relaxed, content with my current living situation. Eventually, I felled into a deep state of dejection as I came to the realization that I did not accomplish my ultimate goal of becoming a consistent trader. The reality is I stopped working towards my dream and abandoned my purpose in life. I decided to retake my trading journey once again and recently discovered these unprecedented opportunities these funding companies today provide to the small retail trader. In reality, I have spent maybe 3-4 years really laser-focused on my trading out of those ten years, but nevertheless have been a losing trader for ten years. In those 3-4 years I was focused, only the 7-months deployment window was when I in fact practiced the 10,000 rule properly.
Over the years, I learned I had a 40%-win rate and managed to breakeven. I was under the illusion that this was great as I was not losing considerably during my learning curve and with time I would turn into a profitable trader. Was I wrong. Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. Today as I retake this journey, I am currently at a 16%-win rate (5 wins and 26 losses; 14 losses in a row) and yet have not blown my funding challenge. I have identified that my trading psychology and money management remained intact, and my trading model/strategy has been impaired. Once I fix this, I can then tweak my trading system (rules) to have them both in sync. The best part is I’m losing and learning (adapting and overcoming) essentially risk-free.
Doctors spend roughly +11 years in school (4 years of undergraduate, 4 years of medical school, and at least 3 years in residency programs.) Neurosurgery, one of the highest specialized fields in medicine requires their neurosurgeons to spend roughly 7 years in a residency program. After more than a decade of schooling, they will be working +14-16 hours shifts. Today, funded 20-year-old traders are making more than neurosurgeons working only 2-3 hours a day from the comfort of their home. What a time to be alive! However, understand that trading is the hardest way to make easy money after all.
It took me roughly six-seven hours to write this forum and over a decade to put the pillars of trading I constructed in my memory on paper and sincerely hope this helps new traders that are embarking on their trading journey for it to be less strenuous. You must focus on all these specific pillars simultaneously or you will lose precious time like I have. I wanted to point you in the right direction as today there is so much useless crap out there that it will only steer you away from the correct path and make your personal learning curve that much longer. This is the dark side of trading that no one really likes to talk about. The last piece of advice I can give you is if you want to be a consistent trader, you must have a consistent set of actions and your consistent set of actions must revolve around these pillars.
I wish you all happy trading.
My journey in the financial markets started towards the end of 2013, one day sitting at the lunch break room of the office where I picked up a magazine that had an article about the stock market. Soon after, I had ordered on Amazon over a dozen books to skimmed through them and started trading stocks for a full year. At the end of the year, I was at breakeven with a loss under $100. I was over the moon, as I read most beginner traders will inevitably lose money in the early years but I managed to breakeven. Ten years later, I am writing this article as my way of giving back to new traders in hopes that they do not repeat the same mistakes.
2014: -$58 ---------- 2019: -$103
2015: $138 ---------- 2020: -$801
2016: -$734 --------- 2021: $226
2017: -$190 --------- 2022: $687
2018: -$2,535 ------- 2023: -$504 (up until May)
I am currently down in my trading journey $3,370, have spent around $5,580 in numerous trading courses over the years, and have invested $981 in 2023 so far in funding challenges (will talk about funding in much more detailed below.) In ten years, I am down almost $10K and have not seen any type of return on investment (ROI.) At the end of the day, a tree is judged based on the fruit it bears, not its desire to bear fruit. We do need to produce real-life results. This means a trader is judged on consistent performance and withdrawals, it’s that simple. My goal with this forum is to significantly reduce your learning curve in your own trading journey.
After trading stocks (and briefly options), in mid-2015 I learned about FX and decided that the currency market was the trading instrument I wanted to master. I was laser-focused on learning this market until mid-2018 (which included a 7-month deployment overseas where all I did was literally go to work, work-out, and study the charts.) Soon after, I started receiving monthly compensation and trading was no longer my priority.
Most of us get into trading because we hate our jobs and have this belief that trading will replace our income and in the near future actually sustain our lifestyle. Let me tell you this couldn’t be further from the truth. The reality is most of us are undercapitalized and have this illusion that we will go from being broke to consistent profitable in a year or two, thanks to the infinite number of successful Instagram traders that did just that and are willing to teach you, all you need to do is buy their $300 course. They are not real traders; they are salespersons selling the dream and you are the one fueling their lifestyle. My suggestion: work on developing skills not related to trading that will let you get a higher paying job to help fund your trading account and/or pay for funding challenges as you work towards your journey of becoming a profitable trader first before even contemplating the idea that trading is the solution to quitting the job you dearly hate. Trading is the only profession where you can do everything right and still not succeed, so it would be wise to develop your skill tree beyond trading to increase the chances of trading success in the future.
For about a year and a half, I was able to pay for my living expenses using my monthly compensation and although I was still trading, I was not obsessed with reaching trading success like I was initially for the simple reason that I had regained my freedom/time back unexpectedly with my compensation instead of my trading. It requires ten thousand hours of work on any particular craft to be in contention for greatness. To put this into perspective, you must spend roughly 20 hours per week/3-4 hours per day for almost a decade to hit this milestone. I simply have not been putting in the work required to succeed. It’s also important to clarify that it’s not just about putting in the work but the correct work, it’s quality over quantity. You will be wasting precious time if the work you are putting in is inapt. I will be discussing shortly the pillars crucial to your development as a trader and what the focus of your ten thousand hours journey should look like.
There are four pillars that a trader must develop and excel in to become consistently profitable. They are: the trading model (the strategy you use in the market), your trading system (the rules you have in place to initiate a trade), trading psychology/mindset, and risk/money management. In 2023, a new pillar was added to the foundation: prop firms/funding challenges. If you are not using these prop firms in 2023, you are doing yourself such a disservice. Now, let’s dive deeper into each pillar.
The Trading Model/Strategy:
In terms of reading charts (technical analysis), you will hear of support and resistance, supply and demand, the trend, liquidity, indicators, candlestick patterns, market structure and the list will go on. It is your job to start doing your diligent research on these topics and putting the pieces together. You do not need to purchase any courses, there is plenty of free information available online for you to digest and begin your development.
Once you start getting the grasp of technical analysis and the way you want to trade the markets, do not fall into the vicious trap of changing strategies every time you have a bad trading week. This cycle will last years and be detrimental to your development if you allow it. Your trading edge is not defined by one or two trades, instead it is defined over a number of trades (20-30). Losing is inevitable in this business, it is how you manage these losses that will define you as a trader. If after 20-30 trades you are in red, this is the time to take a step back and evaluate your trading journal to find the failure and implement a solution, not after one or two trades.
During this time of self-development, you will most likely be digesting a lot of information online. You probably will find a mentor and want to purchase education courses. This is perfectly fine, but make sure the investment will be worth it. If your mentor has a big ego and is constantly bragging how he/she came from nothing to something in a year or two and is always showing off materialistic possessions, I can guarantee you his/her course education is something that can be found free online and is nothing special. For every 1,000 trading mentors, I believe only one will be worth the investment (if that.) Let’s say you found a mentor worth the investment, understand that it still doesn’t guarantee you will be able to replicate his/her success. Out of every 100 students of his/hers, only one or two will successfully implement what he/she has learned. This is due to different human personalities, different trading style capabilities, different risk tolerance and the list goes on. Your personal chart development is crucial to find what works for you. Spend more time on you and less time digesting other traders’ performance.
Don’t make the mistake I made of becoming an excellent hindsight trader. I developed a deep understanding of why things happen in the market (in hindsight) but find myself unable to execute consistently in a live market. Money is made in the live market and one must develop the right skills to be proficient in the live market. In hindsight, it is easy to pick the supply zone that would have worked perfectly out of the 10 zones formed, but in a live market picking this zone is where years of sacrifices will come into play. Finally, you can be the best live trader in the world but if you are weak in the other foundation pillars, you will not succeed.
Your Trading System:
Your trading system correlates with your trading model/strategy. Simply put, your trading system is the rules you have in place to enter a trade based on the trading strategy/unique perspective you have on the market. If A and B happens, I will wait for C to take place before entering a trade. If C does not happen during these specific times, the trade idea is no longer valid. You can’t simply copy another trader’s rules and expect success, the rules are born from the hours and hours you must put in to develop that personal sixth sense to successfully trade the live market (in a way that makes sense for you.) You may use your mentor’s rules as a foundation to begin with, but you must tweak them as you develop and find your preferred/effective method of trading. For example, your mentor can easily hold trades for a RR of 1:3 but you learn that you are most profitable with a RR 1:2 as your trades usually reverse before they hit a 1:3. The goal is to keep your rules simple and not make them so complex that when it is time to execute, you do not become a deer caught in headlights. Once your trading strategy becomes in synch with your trading rules, you’re halfway there.
Trading Psychology/Mindset:
Trading psychology means you understand/accept that it is impossible to win every single trade. You begin to understand that focusing on a few pairs is best, that trading only during a specific set time each day is best, that if you won a trade but did not follow your trading plan/rules it is not beneficial to your overall trading. You develop a real market intuition and begin to understand the importance of discipline and patience in trading. Being discipline to follow your trading plan at all times and having the patience to sit on the sidelines waiting for your A+ setup; if there is no A+ setup (all your rules’ criteria were not activated), there is no trade. You begin to understand that sitting on the sidelines and preserving capital in itself increases your profits/winnings.
Mark Douglas’s book Trading in the Zone and his YouTube video Mark Douglas – Mind Over Matter are a great place to start developing your trading psychology. Remember, it takes time (years) to develop the correct trading mindset. Eventually, you will see your model/strategy presents itself over and over again. However, you need to understand that every trade is different and unique. Take it but execute accordingly each time. Your entries do not need to be perfect, but your execution does regardless of the trade’s outcome. Never marry any of your trades, ever. Once you truly understand that a trade’s outcome is irrelevant and this is a game of probabilities, you have developed a strong trading mindset.
Risk/Money Management:
You can be the best chart reader in the world, have a strong trading mindset, but if you are weak in this pillar, you will ultimately fail. Optimal risk management means small wins, small losses, big wins. You begin to truly understand your win rate and risk:reward formula that works for your trading. You are flexible but you never allow a big loss to start developing, moving your stop-loss in hopes that the trade will reverse back in your favor. We are not in the business of being right all the time, leave your ego elsewhere. We are in the business of making money. Money management is #1 to ensure longevity.
Prop Firm/Funding Challenges:
Funding companies started emerging in 2018-2019 and were full of uncertainty, in many cases traders not receiving payouts and companies ultimately going out of business. Fast-forward to 2023, there are a couple of funding companies established in 2020-2021 that have grown to become reputable and credible over the last 2-3 years, and the return on investment (ROI) opportunities these funding companies offer to a skilled trader are unprecedented. There are many new funding companies that emerge nowadays, but I would stick to the ones that have proven to be credible. The reality is these funding companies are not the solution to your trading if you still have not proven consistency and you must practice excellent risk management to preserve your capital.
The reality is that only 30% of traders will pass the funding challenge and receive their first payout, and even a less percentage of traders will pass and stay funded. Those that pass the challenge usually lose their accounts shortly after and this becomes a vicious cycle of them losing money in the way of them paying for funding challenges repeatedly. This is a win-win business model for these prop firms, majority of traders fail and practice terrible money management and lose their accounts over and over again and for those few traders that are actually consistently profitable, they share a profit split with the company. We don’t know for sure how long these companies will remain around, but I suspect for a long time as they are positive cash-flow businesses and the idea of making money online is ever-growing.
So how do these funding challenges actually work? Let’s say you purchase a $100,000 funding challenge for $600. You must achieve a 10% profit ($10K) in this $100K account (demo) to pass the challenge. After, you are given a live account to trade (or another demo account and a company’s trader will copy your trades as you have proven consistency.) The business model is so lucrative that they might even pay you with the funding fees constantly losing traders pay. Regardless, once you are funded and you make lets say 10% in profits and want to withdraw, usually you will be paid $8,000 and the company keeps $2,000 (20%) in the profit split. So, for the few skilled traders that can pass a challenge and stay funded, the ROI is unlimited and these funding companies are truly revolutionizing the major issue most traders will face: being extremely undercapitalized.
How can you lose your funding challenge/funded account? You must first understand you are not truly in control of $100,000. Instead, you are really only managing the maximum drawdown the company allows. Let’s say it’s 6% ($6,000.) If at any point your balance reaches $94,000 you will lose the account and have to repay the fee to try another challenge. Since you have $100,000 buying power and leverage, if you don’t manage your risk profile efficiently, you will win big and lose big. It’s truly a double-edged sword.
So how do you preserve your account? My suggestion: divide your Maximum Drawdown by 20 or 30. Let’s say you divided by 30, you must now lose $200 per trade idea 30 times in a row to lose your account. As far as leverage goes, let’s say for your $100,000 account you are given a leverage of 10:1. You can trade a 1,000,000 lot or $100 per pip. I suggest only using 1/5th of the leverage offered ($20 in this case.) If you manage your challenge in this manner, you avoid constantly losing your account in a single trade or two as you develop the skills necessary to properly manage the account. And if you become really proficient, you can manage more than one account. The possibilities are endless.
As you can see, for a $600 fee you are given the opportunity to manage X10 the amount of capital essentially risk-free. You can learn to trade without the fear of losing your hard-earned money and work towards becoming a consistent trader and achieving consistent withdrawals. Those that say you’re not a real trader because you’re not trading your own personal account are simply delusional and not taking advantage of the new opportunities in this day and age to help fund their personal accounts faster. Those that say trading with prop firms sucks, there are too many rules, the reality is these rules help you learn to preserve your capital (longevity is the name of the game) and this is exactly how you should be managing your personal account anyways.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back to my story, early 2020 I decided to move to a different country where my monthly compensation would go further and I would not have to worry about my finances and would use that to my advantage to focus back on my trading, but this did not happen. Over the last three years, I have instead focused on sightseeing the country and being relaxed, content with my current living situation. Eventually, I felled into a deep state of dejection as I came to the realization that I did not accomplish my ultimate goal of becoming a consistent trader. The reality is I stopped working towards my dream and abandoned my purpose in life. I decided to retake my trading journey once again and recently discovered these unprecedented opportunities these funding companies today provide to the small retail trader. In reality, I have spent maybe 3-4 years really laser-focused on my trading out of those ten years, but nevertheless have been a losing trader for ten years. In those 3-4 years I was focused, only the 7-months deployment window was when I in fact practiced the 10,000 rule properly.
Over the years, I learned I had a 40%-win rate and managed to breakeven. I was under the illusion that this was great as I was not losing considerably during my learning curve and with time I would turn into a profitable trader. Was I wrong. Insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. Today as I retake this journey, I am currently at a 16%-win rate (5 wins and 26 losses; 14 losses in a row) and yet have not blown my funding challenge. I have identified that my trading psychology and money management remained intact, and my trading model/strategy has been impaired. Once I fix this, I can then tweak my trading system (rules) to have them both in sync. The best part is I’m losing and learning (adapting and overcoming) essentially risk-free.
Doctors spend roughly +11 years in school (4 years of undergraduate, 4 years of medical school, and at least 3 years in residency programs.) Neurosurgery, one of the highest specialized fields in medicine requires their neurosurgeons to spend roughly 7 years in a residency program. After more than a decade of schooling, they will be working +14-16 hours shifts. Today, funded 20-year-old traders are making more than neurosurgeons working only 2-3 hours a day from the comfort of their home. What a time to be alive! However, understand that trading is the hardest way to make easy money after all.
It took me roughly six-seven hours to write this forum and over a decade to put the pillars of trading I constructed in my memory on paper and sincerely hope this helps new traders that are embarking on their trading journey for it to be less strenuous. You must focus on all these specific pillars simultaneously or you will lose precious time like I have. I wanted to point you in the right direction as today there is so much useless crap out there that it will only steer you away from the correct path and make your personal learning curve that much longer. This is the dark side of trading that no one really likes to talk about. The last piece of advice I can give you is if you want to be a consistent trader, you must have a consistent set of actions and your consistent set of actions must revolve around these pillars.
I wish you all happy trading.