Your Challenges

I started my journey around 20 years ago & I recall many lessons I learned then have not changed much today for those embarking on their own self-discoveries. 

Many of us who've been trading though this rocky period whilst growing our "Trading Wings" have been through it, the process of trying to make sense of the landscape, largely because there is no manual as to how to do it properly... & so, with a passion in our hearts & a spring in our step the journey to "find out" begins...

What Self-Monitoring?

So you’re sitting down in front of your execution platform feeling pumped that cash has been transferred & your balance is visible, you are bursting with passion & a strong will to trade your way to financial freedom.

Q. What’s your next move?

The typical newcomer mistake is to operate from a belief system that begins & ends with the Trading Platform in use. Then it dawns quickly & the New Trader begins to question if they should really be making trade decisions sat in front of an execution platform's order system with a finger on the trigger for 6 hrs of the day aka "Day-Trading" without any real plan how to do it.  This voice only ever grows in volume.

Dead end Learning

Other Courses?

Join the queue-of-frustration. An in-depth online search for courses purporting to teach people “How to Trade” returns sources that don't deliver much that would be  required to produce a rock-solid basis of profitability, often overselling misapplied Technical Analysis, or offering great marketing, at the expense quality, & thus offerings of abysmally poor deliverables that have no respect for the money paid to acquire them.  

Worst still, content full of half-baked platform links they want you to use purely for the sake of commissions they'd earn & not because the platform was any kind of leading advantage. As we progress in time, we may trial many platforms in the mistaken belief that is where our error lays, leading to learning curves just to understand how to operate in it. We discover that Courses linked to platforms & Brokers only deliver assistance based upon the platform & only to inform us of basic terminology or platform XYZ Controls. So we waste days to weeks additionally learning about products we end up having little affinity for in the end. 

Faceless Voices

So often, we would then turn our focus to finding others who may have achieved what we're looking for, but being New, we begin by making searches across social media & popular forums in the hunt for clues. We discover faceless voices providing all manner of confusing advice that relates to Short-termism e.g. "Scalping", I once followed the Scalping approach, but my losses increased due to impulsive & non-strategic trades. Scalping I discovered, propagated unhealthy habits whilst having no self-management characteristics at all. Without some process or self-management, scalping leads to "death by 1000 cuts", & so my quest for better structure, better organization, a proper framework to manage all these variables continued. 

Platform flip-flop

During my discovery days I would often flip flop between different platforms in the belief that the road to financial freedom lay in the platform or tools I was using. So I discovered a vast array of trading tools, some of which were priced at £500 pm, but none of these tools improved my Trading because I didn't realise these tools mean nothing if you haven't got your internal & thinking processes right before you use them. This lesson cost me about 6 months in time & more money & it still affects the uninitiated in vast number today.

Poor Application

Having a plan is not the same thing as executing it properly. Often standing in the way of good execution of your plan is a lack of a framework that will help monitor the process efficiently.  I recall many times the disconnect between having some kind of notion of a plan only for there to be no connection between that plan and my actions in the day, so the plan was meaningless in practice, do you recognise this one?

Without such a system in place, there will be no progress because you won’t have any measure for what works, when & how much it worked. Poor Application of your Trading Plan & your set-ups will kill your account balance in a way you may initially dismiss, but as you become more aware what's going on, the losses are rapid & potentially, with time, catastrophic... (AKA " The Blow-Up “).

Furthermore, at the end of the blow-up, you’ll have not learned anything properly about what does & doesn’t work. Why? Because you had no system in place to monitor your set-ups & record results of the same, meaning you went through a process, it hurt your account & you've   little experiential knowledge from it, which in turn means you're likely to rerepeat the mistake again. The act of Trading is filled with so many issues many cannot adapt to without extensive assistance because in this world you cannot transfer brick and mortar or even online skills to it without some conditioning to remap yourself, it's not your fault, it's just the way Trading is configured.

The above is just an exceedingly small sample of the issues faced by new Traders & its intention is to help strike a chord of familiarity in your experience. If this is indeed reflective of your experience you need to know it's not you, it's not your fault, this process is by design, because so far nearly all the protagonists you've met on the way to reaching this point, don't have your best interests at heart... until now!

...Next up let's explore elements of "Your Awakening"... the green shoots that may hint at you turning a corner.

Your Awakening

So looking back, I had been Trading at this stage for about a year, I was deeply in the red by around 5 figures of Trading debt, often attempting to Trade frequently because I had formulated an irrational plan of sorts that doing this would allow me to quickly claw back losses. a classic mistake. Emotions like a roller-coaster as I tried to make sense of it all, I realised that I was still losing tremendous amounts of money daily, scrambling to stem the losses in panic when exposed, & yet out of trade I could think logically, "oh!  Why?"

That was My first profound awakening. It was born of frustration, but that led to an inward focus, an introspection, a listening, a feedback loop...

"How can it be, that my trading results are worse than say a 50:50 coin toss?"

Delving into the issue over more weeks & months brought up more self-analysis & opened the flood gates of self-awareness.  My biggest problem is that it took a lot of money & precious time to arrive at that point, & for a large section of dabbling Traders, do they even awaken? The answer for many is "not at all..." let that sink in...

So, the realisations started coming in waves as I'd  unpick platforms, processes, habits, & behaviours by looking closer for clues as to

"What the hell is going on with me"? 

So, similarly, you may awaken that your broker’s objective is to extract commissions through increased order flow from you, not make you money. So now the Platform spell is broken, you begin to see their objectives are misaligned with yours, & following on from that a reassessment of all your Trading tools through a critical eye takes place going forward. A great thing, but nobody is around to congratulate you, despite your awakening being due a standing ovation from a room full of the world's best Traders & Investors.

It starts to dawn on you that having a plan is not the same thing as executing a plan. Often standing in the way of good execution of your plan is a lack of a framework to execute your thinking from inception to placing the trades. But what isnt seemingly being addressed are aspects of your personal life which seem to spill over into Trading causing a bewildering array of different fields, subjects & priorities both internal & external to manage.

"There were times when I was so overwhelmed contemplating all of that it took me to the brink, worse still episodes of placing too much money on trades to claw back losses, heart beating in my chest feeling the beats in my neck and face & realising I won't live long if this continues daily"

Further research in your awakening may lead you to break an important barrier, namely you may begin to question the effectiveness of relying solely on Technical Analysis. It's easy to fall into the trap of thinking that it's the ultimate solution to generating consistent profits & high win ratios. But the reality is that empirical statistics & data show that this approach doesn't work as a fool proof mechanism for predicting price movement.

Now, don't get me wrong, Technical Analysis can still be a valuable tool in your trading arsenal. It can help identify price levels where a stock may consolidate or experience support or resistance. This is particularly useful when looking at long-term charts, such as daily or weekly time frames. But here's another awakening I stumbled upon...

"Does Technical Analysis Move Price?"

The reason I /we may come to a point where we question this is because we adopted a belief from searching, listening, reading, looking for clues early on remember? Weve adopted this thinking from the noise. We have become "infected".

Help & Courses?

An in-depth online search for courses purporting to teach people “how to Trade” returns sources that rarely offer full programmes required to produce a rock-solid basis of understanding.

Obviously, a 2-day seminar or courses that gift you a “profitable strategy” (really?) are going to fail you because.

1) There is no appreciation or configuration for the most crucial element of your Trading, which means YOU are not prioritised, so there can be no true fit with you, meaning the process may never be traded correctly because it simply won't fit what I call your Risk Profile Stack.

2) Because actually, markets change continuously, ask yourself, where is the mechanism for adjustment or retreat for use in the right market environment? Is it even defined? Its Questions like these which help expose the validity of the source issuing such claims, & become weapons in your quest for uncovering good Trading philosophies and tools.

3) It is unlikely those strategies reflect your unique risk appetite or true market preferences, i.e. they don’t account for who you are.

 Another awakening. In our quest for truth from others, typically online from forums and social media, we naively equate volume of responses to advice we see, to be indicative of "truth", without evaluation of the authenticity or identity of those voices, think Review sites for example. However, what is astonishing, is that we observe the majority of New Traders behaviourally follow themselves... & you may notice how the responses are collectively similar, discuss similar traits & disagree collectively about what is & isn't right.  Realising this observation is profound, observing it better still because now we begin to see a gap between us & this amorphous mass of noise that doesn't actually serve you.

Can you see that the awakening is creating patterns relating to  not only other New Traders but also yourself and how you work as a Human?

"If you don’t know where your advantages lay up-front, then how do you know that the path you’re on in your trading is right for you? Why did you choose that route you’re on now? "

The problems involved in acquiring the skill to Trade are often underestimated, that's why many successful Traders are quoted as saying

"Trading, is the hardest way to make an easy living"

The journey can be particularly tough, some may say brutal, depending on the path you've taken to arrive at this point.

The reason we persist, is because one fundamental truth holds dear, & that is the spectacular promise of returns possible when issues that need controlling are themselves handled, managed, & work together harmoniously to produce flow that is unique & therefore highly personal to the Trader, because ultimately no two traders are alike. (Another awakening realisation).

Trading has the potential to take you all the way, not only to redefine who you are as a person to yourself, but also to demonstrate to others your mastery process,  of personal change, & of self a vehicle for personal life . In addition, getting the art of Trading right can send you global & into one of the most exclusive clubs in the world.  The only question is how serious are you in wanting to elevate consistently to get there? Can you consistently stay the course & improve whilst the majority stagnate or fall-out?

That is the question...

The ultimate realisation Traders come to, in the end.. is that actually

"If you are unsure what you’re doing wrong when striving for profitability, there needs to be a process of measurement that comes early in the learning & Trading process,"

Nobody shares your personality, character or experiences that shape your personal appetite for risk. Your risk profile is therefore unique and cannot be transferred easily at all, neither therefore can you easily accept someone elses risk profile because it won't fit you.

... and so we come to a point where we realise, perhaps with a little help that the answers to all the awakenings you're having are pointing to something profound. That Trading success isnt found in someone else gifting you a strategy or set-up to attempt to Trade, but rather to develop every aspect of trading yourself, from the ground up, with a system that focuses on your needs, your desires, your risk appetite, your knowledge, including your experiences.  What is required therefore, is a system of self management that focuses upon your unique risk profile, & the process that will guide you there every step of the way uses the delta V framework. 

EQsIQ Δv