There is no better way to understand how hard is to be a trader or investor than actually start being one. Open an account with a small value and buy your first asset. Remember that the account must be small because you will break, then you can not lose something that will hurt you. Established this begining, feel the emotion flowing and hands shaking every time you push the button. Precisely because it is difficult, you should try to be a trader. This difficulty makes you start off the promises of easy, fast and astronomical gains. How many times have you read that a person Y has won more than XXXX% in a few days ... sometimes hours. Pure quackery.

I have repeated countless times and it is time to do it again: everything in life takes time, is molded with practice, with trials and mistakes. It takes a while to you really call yourself a trader. You will do this in the beginning. You will spread the word to everyone around you about how much your portfolio has grown in a week while your friends will still be in single savings accounts. One day you will lose a lot, then will be ashamed of them and everything you said, but do not not give up. So you start to be more cautious with each one f your words. A trader has born!

But if it's so hard, why should I try to be a trader?

There is a person's profile that likes to excel, to be challenged and do more of it. They like clearly to feel the reward for every act and constantly improve. Being a trader is thinking in psychology, discipline and finally strategy. Starting with psychology, you have to control your emotions before all of it. Then, when you're thinking with your head, you must have discipline (remember the post on the reward for consistency) to strictly follow all that you have learned. Finally, you have the strategy, the trading system to operate in the market. I say most people lose money because they already start in the strategy but forget to control the emotions and at the lower bump in market they are are out, settled and emotionally wounded. Then the guilty one is the market or yourself? You will see it is not so easy to buy low and sell high.

You are (or should be) responsible for your actions. We grew up listening to it and this concept is present in discussions about determinism and free will. If there is no free will, how can be there an individual responsibility?

Free will is the possibility of having the power to make a free choice. It has been discussed by science and religion and is still controversial. The deterministic thinking says that all events are caused in a necessary and sufficient way for previous events, that is, a person is deprived of freedom to decide and influence the phenomena that him/her takes part. In the other hand, libertarianism supports the view that people have free will and are the agent's actions that always produce the event. The latter concept is most commonly used in economics.

At the end of the day, we know that we are responsible for our actions. And these actions would not have been committed without free will. It was our decision. It is common today to assign the responsibility of things to others ... Outsourcing guilt corrupts you and prevents you from going futher, in life and in the market. We blame the government, a friend, the neighbor, the hole in the street, politicians and many other concrete and abstract beings, but we forget that the decision was made by ourselves. This is very hard to accept, that is way we have this tendency to outsource the guilt and responsibility. When you take your part in the error, you open the door for a new journey of knowledge to be started, once you can identify what are the most relevant factors about the error, and which are the secondary factors of error (here we can allocate the third party responsability), and try our best to prevent or avoid a repetition of this harmful action.

How being a trader help you with that?

You, as a trader, will go wrong. You will make mistakes. And also will blame the market, the big sharks, the speech of a president of the Central Bank or the "current economic environment". But it will be hard to look at yourself and remember that it was you who pushed the button. No one forced you to it. We have a natural difficulty in accepting our mistakes, and denial is a strong step in this process. Those who are released faster from the denial phase accelerate the acceptance stage that cause natural evolution as a trader and as an individual.

As many things in life, trading is not different: if you are consistent about doing something, you will have your reward in the end. Of course, this is not related in doing wrong things all the time (although it will also “rewards” you somehow). Let us say after you have decided to be a trader, you may be luck and have a great first profitable month. Ok, for sure it has a chance of you just being lucky. However, let us assume you were not and were helped by your skills as future trader. As things in life are not linear, in the following month you not had the chance to trade as you did before. What happened? Probably a non-profitable month. Then yours self-steam as trader starts going down and you are done: your emotions will take control of you.

However, in fact, what happened?

Having as premise that you have a profitable trading system, there is one thing you should care about that is the fact that your trading system for sure is not 100% accurate (as none trading system is in this planet). It will be right and wrong according to the market fluctuation. That is why you went in loss for the second month. As we do not know when your trading system will fail, you must do your trades consistently in order to be exposed in the market as much close as possible to all “right” and “wrong” entries. Then you, on average, will be right according to yours trading system average – which means profits. If you trade occasionally, you are setting the odds against you – unless your method tells you to trade occasionally.

Besides this mathematical effect of consistency, we have another point: we humans are very good classification machines. We learn with time from observations. Therefore, if you are trading frequently naturally on every new trade you will become a better trader than before. This is how life works – it is not me saying it, just observe from your experiences. Ok, it is very hard to accept this somethings – but this is what shows that you have emotional intelligence to be finally a trader. You must accept that things does not happened exactly in the time you want them to happen, so be patient (another great skill you develop from being a trader).

Right now, when I am writhing these words, I am in a position that is against me. It is not easy to be comfortable with it but I did my entry based on my trading system. There is nothing to be afraid once I know why I did the entry and when I must leave. As it is an entry based on a high probability trading – and I am doing this for quite a long time – I have the odds in my favor. In case the odds turns against me, a suitable stop loss will take place and tomorrow, I will have another chance.

Well, there are problems and try to bypass or avoid them only will make them become larger. This is not news to anyone, although people still insist on ignoring this fact - and yes, we all do it. That is, the zero step to solving a problem is to accept that there is one.

There are some outstanding features of the people who are natural problem solvers. We can see that they naturally take more risks, are persistent, with an open and curious mind; and not only! Being nonconformist is another key skill. There is always a way to do something and if it was not found yet, the nonconformist will not rest until they find a way. We can then say that being a risk-taker, persistent and curious will make us an incensed person. 

And is that good?

The daily exercise to become a trader makes us develop these special skills to be a problem-solver more practical and effective. The first major problem of a trader is to control the emotions and know the right time to make an entry. With some exceptions, traders have good strategies, but they usually do not work because their own. Thus, the daily exercise of patience and observation during the trading is extrapolated to other areas of life, as we are inseparable beings. A familiar problem will affect your performance during a trade and vice versa. Do not ignore this fact.

Being aware of this leads us to the level of reflection. Decisions will become more meticulous, taking into account different views and perspectives on the problem. In addition, there will be an association with past experiences. A troubleshooter is also a good associator, learning from past mistakes and repeating good behaviors. Whenever we encounter a new problem (in life or trading) it is interesting raise some points first:

What is the real problem?
When it happened?
What is preventing me to solve it?
Is this problem influencing other areas of my life? (Remember that we are inseparable beings)​