Disliked{quote} Thanks Sis.yphus for the insights. I am grateful for the unique of interpreting the markets. One thing: Your posts have great value and your interpretation of the markets is unambiguous. In a recent post you mentioned the kind of technical analysis you are partial to. It's really out of the box thinking, I am not talking about finding the ideal settings for an indicator or exploiting some kind of repeatable pattern like trading during a particular session or a twist to price action setups... You are altogether in a different league that...Ignored
There is no innate talent or required level of IQ in my opinion. The only thing that separates winners and losers is persistence and a willingness to learn and accept the fact that there is always a lot to learn.
As Steve Jobs said, "Stay Foolish, Stay Hungry"
I am still learning every day. And I mean learn about all sorts of things, not just the market, but psychology, how the brain works, why we do what we do, spirituality, physics, quantum physics, politics, propaganda, why governments exist, history, why currency exists in the first place, morality, cycles that occur in nature etc. You need to study all sorts of things because everything is related in someone and there is always something that can be taken from this and applied to that.
I try and read 1-2 books a week and I learn alot from doing that. Most people don't read a book a year.
Learn about proper goal setting and how to measure goals. One huge mistake is people set goals like, I want $1000.00. Then they measure their progress of the goal based on how much money they have. They see they don't have $1000.00 and think I am not meeting my goal and I am failing. This is deeply flawed logic that doesn't make sense. If you want $1000.00, you should measure your progress of obtaining that goal by the understanding you have on what it takes to make $1000.00 and how you can make $1000.00 and what steps are needed to make $1000.00. And since you can never lose your understanding of something, you will always be progressing towards your goal, never taking any steps back. And by doing this, you will inevitably reach your goal. Once you start measuring your goals and the progress made towards them based on understanding instead of things like dollar amounts or arbitrary milestones, things will change.
Another thing, learn to become extremely self-aware.
And if there is one core belief you need to hold in your life it is this. Everything you do should be done with the goal of making sense out of reality. And if you need to be able to recognize when you are experience cognitive dissonance, as this will cause you to rationalize things that don't make sense. I will upload a short book that talks about this that personally changed my life. I will also upload a few videos that go into our brains and how they handle beliefs and why we do and think the things we think.
When I first started trading 7 years ago, I knew nothing of even the simplest forms of math. I didn't know how to program or anything. I didn't know about macroeconomics or even microeconomics. I didn't even know Central Banks set interest rates.
What I did know though, was that I would do anything I could to figure this shit out, and I didn't care how long it would take. I literally told myself, even if it takes 30 years to figure out, the amount of money you can make in 10, will be more than what I would likely make working 40 years at some regular job and I would be given the one thing that is most important to me, freedom.
I also know our brains experience what is known as neuroplasticity which is "the ability of the brain to form and reorganize synaptic connections, especially in response to learning or experience or following injury."
You can literally rewire the neurons in your brain by what you feed it, strengthening the neurons necessary to succeed in whatever it is you are doing.
I also knew that what I was doing and how I was approaching the market didn't make sense. It didn't make sense to try and technically analyze the market when I had no programming ability and couldn't even explain how technical indicators actually worked or what was going on under the hood. So I taught myself how to program over a period of 6 months working at it 4-5 hours a day (I have no life). Once I had some basic programming down I didn't stop there because I now knew how most technical indicators worked, and it didn't make any sense that these would be able to make one profitable over the long term. I then started to learn how to truly perform real statistical analysis on things, not just the market. I haven't stopped there either. I am currently studying machine learning and working on creating my own algorithms that I hope to implement into my trading someday.
I also didn't understand how the market was truly structured, what it is based on. How it really works, and what it is in the market I am trying to overcome, and it's not all the other traders participating. That is a load of crap. So I researched and learned about why markets are created in the first place and things like that.
I also realized I knew nothing about what is really driving currency prices. So I sat down and study micro and macroeconomics to figure out how economies really work, and why some work better than others.
I guarantee you 99.99% of traders on here will never take the time to learn how to program an indicator or even a simple hello world javascript code that prints a line text in your Google Chrome console, yet they will lose thousands of dollars trading them thinking they know how the damn thing works. If you can type a sentence, you can type code. 90% of the traders on here won't even read this thread because you actually have to freaking read it and think and make sense out of the information in it. You can't just look at a chart and make money. And ask yourself does that even make sense? Seriously, does it makes sense that someone should be able to make a living by just looking at a chart with lines on it?
So again, what has attributed to me being in the "cream layer" as you put it is my persistent to never stop learning and my belief that everything needs to make sense, and if it doesn't, it's wrong.
My god this post is all over the place, but I hope it helps. I will upload a few vids and pdf's that explain a lot of this stuff better and add a new psychology section to the first post of the thread.
I also highly encourage you to go check out a thread i started a while back going into our brains and the tricks it plays on us. You can find it here .
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