There are many of you out there that follow the trading world closely but don’t actually trade. You follow traders on Twitter, you subscribe to newsletters, but you haven’t ever put on a trade. There is nothing wrong doing that for a period of time. It is actually a great idea to study the markets and successful traders before getting in with your hard earned money. However at some point, if you truly have a passion for the financial markets, you should make the leap and try trading at least part-time. For all we know this is the only life we have, and you cannot get old and look back with this kind of regret. This article is meant to show you that there is almost no downside to attempting to become a successful full or part-time trader, even if you end up failing and losing money.
I will preface that I’m completely bias with this since trading has changed my life completely. It has given me professional and financial freedom and a passion that drives me everyday to be the best version of myself.
Improve Your Decision Making
Trading requires you to develop and create a precise decision-making process that will lead to the best outcome for your capital. Refining your decision-making process will not only have the potential to make you a ton of money trading stocks. It will also greatly improve your decision making in your personal and professional life, and as a result, improve the quality of your life. Trading is not the only area in life where you have to take big risks, evaluate risk versus reward, and probability of success.
Self Awareness
Trading requires you to develop a level of self-awareness that you have never had before. In trading, you are constantly in a battle with your emotions. To succeed in trading, you need to keep your emotions from affecting your decision making and from objectively perceiving market information. In other areas of our lives, we constantly let our emotions get in the way of perceiving reality objectively. Think of how many times you made a decision out of revenge and anger and it led to a poor outcome for you in your life. No one is forced to learn how to prevent emotions from affecting your decision making in most professions.
In trading, you are forced to learn how to do this in order to successfully make income from the markets. If you can master this skill, you will learn how to achieve better outcomes for yourself and others in your life. Ray Dalio, the founder of the most successful hedge fund in history: “Truth – more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality – is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.” Trading will help you acquire skill sets to help you develop a more accurate understanding of reality.
Learn Habits That Can Be Applied to Other Areas of Entrepreneurship
The skills and habits that you can develop from trading are needed to succeed in many other entrepreneurial ventures. Running a business constantly involves evaluating the risk versus reward of potential decisions, taking a calculated risk, and figuring out what is the most efficient use of your capital. I have had many students go on from our trading boot camp to become successful business owners with the skills and character traits they developed from going down the path of trading. As a trader, you are essentially the CEO of your own small business. The planning that goes into becoming a successful trader is very similar to the path to becoming a business owner or entrepreneur.
What is the Downside To Trying?
A lot of people are daunted by the “90%+ of traders fail” statistics surrounding retail trading. I cannot sugarcoat it: Trading is one of the hardest things you will ever try. But the rewards, in my opinion, make it worth however long it takes for you to get to the point where you can make money consistently from the markets. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. You will never truly know if you can be a successful trader or not until you try it.
When you try trading you have to always keep in mind that this is a skill set you can be using for the rest of your life. Most people spend 4 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars attending college so you can get a job. Where do you think you would be if you put that time and money into trading? Everyone has different learning speeds for trading and different levels of dedication. Some people can learn it in 6 months, and others take years. It is all up to you, your commitment, and ability to perform under pressure.
Free Live Training Session
If you want to learn some of my proven strategies and best risk management techniques, you should check out this free training session. It will teach you exactly the steps you need to take to become a consistently profitable stock trader.
