​ Improve Your Trading by not Reading this

Wait, what? I don’t want you to read this?

Ok, let’s make an exception for the moment but here’s why you should maybe take a break from reading any trading material for a few weeks.


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We live in a hyper connected world. When you’re not trading, you’re probably reading about trading. You’re on forums, reading e-books, watching videos, because hey, knowledge is power right?

Only sometimes.

In fact, I’d go as far to say that after a certain tipping point in your trading education, you’d be far better off by not consuming any more material on trading.

Why?

Temptation. You’ve got a set of parameters for your trading plan, right? You know what the market needs to look like for you to make an entry, you know what your entry trigger is and you know why you should exit a trade. But what happens if you keep consuming more and more information?

You’ll keep second guessing yourself. You’ll read a thread on a forum that eloquently explains why the author’s entry method is superior to most others and you’ll start thinking, “Wow, that does seem really nice.” Maybe you won’t act on it straight away, but that temptation, that shiny new piece of knowledge will be in the back of your mind every time your current trading system doesn’t work.

But what if that entry is better than my current version?

It doesn’t matter. No, really, it doesn’t.

What you need to focus on as a developing trader is consistency.That should be your only goal. Not 10% per month, or doubling your equity in 20 trades, consistency. For a trader consistency is the foundation of everything.

Without consistency you’ll be swapping and changing your trading principles so often that you’ll have spent years trading poorly and nothing to show for it but a leaky micro account.

Actually, that’s not true, what you will have is this:

- No clear data as to what works.

- No way to determine how to move forward.

- An unclear idea of who or what to trust.

- A lack of clarity, direction and conviction.

- Likely failure.

With consistency, even if your current system is rubbish, you’ll have data. Beautiful data. You’ll also be more likely to find principles that resonate with you over time and principles that have an edge.

Experiment with systems and principles but do so with clear goals and clear timeframes. If you want to trade a price action system to see how it performs, great! But, make sure you:

- Track everything.

- Set a clear time frame for testing or a specific trade sample size (200 trades is good).

- Create mechanical rules that leave no room for interpretation to maintain consistency.


and for your own sanity, stop reading trading material! Test what you’ve got and test it well. In 6 months or even a year from now, you can either have a pile of great quality data and lessons as a result of quality trading, discipline and consistency or you can remain lost and confused, unsure as to why everything you try fails.

So stop reading articles and forums. Stop watching videos and courses.Start trading with one particular method and track your performance for a good amount of time. Fuck your results and losing streaks, create consistency through discipline and focus. Now is as good a time as any to begin your journey, increase your odds of success significantly by growing a set and pushing the new, shiny bullshit out of your mind and developing absolute focus.

Be better tomorrow that you were today and understand that that has nothing to do with your bottom line.

so true..

Totally disagree, my opinion is you have to limit it

Hey TradeDream,

thank you, thank you in the name of a the famous 90% of losing "traders" !!!!

What you say is the one and only truth.

Or have you ever heard about a man who searched the forums for a system, stick to it and made it?

Trading is such a stupid "game" even a 10 year old could do it and double his account every month easy.
But "they" tell us with success, uuhh, watch out, trading is so complicated and almost impossible to understand.

I lost a whole year and a lot of money listening to "them" and never stoped looking for the ultimate system and/or
indicator. Now I know, since I stoped riding this stupid carousel, sticking to a solid system with no fancy indis is the only way to make the first step to success.

I will follow your ideas now even better than I tried for so long and I will never look back and make my way in this dirty game of bankers and marketmakers which are the real terrorists in our society.

Price can only go up or down, but all we do is the wrong thing. Why? Because since generations we got hammered in our head we have to work until we die to get a bit of money. I am leaving this path right now.

I hope many FF-followers will read your post and understand your wake-up-call.

Thank you again!

Well I wouldn't call that totally disagreeing

the most useful thread that i never wanted to read.

Thanks for that wolf, I really appreciate your comment.

Sticking to one thing can really be painful. It's incredibly hard to simply accept a losing streak for example, rather than "look for something better" or "fix the issue". The cycle usually just continues on and nothing useful comes out of the process.

Agree on the base of my own thousands hour of experience ...

TradeDream you gave in this thread a few good advices on trading. I agree that at some point a wannabe trader should stop from acquiring knowledge, until the trader is profitable and consistent. But this should happen after a fair amount of knowledge (quality knowledge, as there is crappy knowledge mostly) has been acquired and the trader should tell the "good from bad".
Indeed I also agree that choosing a way/style/system to trade and really trying to make it work would be far better than trying from 1 to a dozen systems per day, but if the system/strategy is faulted (it doesn;t work because there is no true foundation to it) then there is nothing you can improve to make it consistent.

A lot of traders (probably 95%) are always looking for a system to trade and the system to fit their personality and also be glamorous. In my opinion, searching for such a system or indicator(s) is a lost battle.

@wolf300: I totally agree that trading is very simple, if you have the knowledge, focus and discipline (or just any 2 out of the 3). But as always, a very known quote comes to mind: "Everything Should Be Made as Simple as Possible, But Not Simpler" by A.Einstein.

I have tried hundreds (no exageration) of systems, strategies, indicators in my starting years of trading and read books, theories and information that many of the traders do not even know they exist. Guess what. None of it made me profitable and consistent. (Everyone searches for profitable, very few for consistent.) What made me both profitable and consistent (not trying to brag or anything just making a point) was combining the knowledge and coming up with a different market approach. Not saying is the only way to trade profitable.

Thank you TradeDream...I'm new to the game...and lets face it - it is a game; I suspected as much and appreciate your honesty in this post. As a noob...I am still trying to find my own strategy/comfort zone; meanwhile, I am not going to kid myself into believing in some magic formula. I've already learned some hard lessons this week.

Yeah, there definitely needs to be a discovery period at the beginning. Once you find some concepts that resonate with you, you should definitely consider creating a strict plan and executing on that though. You'll discover a lot about yourself and the market through that process.

Chris Lori has a really great perspective on discovery -> testing -> learning -> integration. He's got some free vids floating about on it.

If I had stopped reading and digging when something didn't make sense to me (like why any moving average system should ever work, for example), I'd still be stuck where I was 4 years ago. It takes time and a lot of headaches trying to separate the mountains of bullshit from the things that might have an inkling of truth to them, and the problem for a lot of people is they have a difficult experience doing that. It doesn't help that there are people on this site whom I am convinced are either attention junkies or criminal fraudsters peddling total nonsense and claiming they have the magic solution. So they get stuck jumping from one worthless moving average MACD cross system to another and never figure out they don't work because they don't even make any sense as to why they should work. Only take the time to really test something out for yourself if there's at least a plausible explanation in terms of order flow for why your trade should work. If your explanation is "I should win because the moving average is really low" then you've got a lot of reading to do yet.

Absolutely, I think a key concept would be one of:

Discover principles that resonate with you -> Test those principles in the form of a solid trading plan with discipline for a good amount of time -> Review and reflect -> Incorporate principles into your trading or revise -> Discover again -> and so on.