It’s no secret that the path to trading profitability is not an easy one. Successful trading requires you to develop habits that are inherently unnatural to most humans. Reprogramming your brain to become a successful trader is not an overnight process. It takes months, sometimes years, for you to make the necessary changes to occur.
That being said, you need to know all the shortcuts that will speed up the reprogramming process and allow you to develop the habits to succeed. In this article, we will talk about the 3 most important things you can do to expedite your trading learning curve.
Learn From Others’ Mistakes
In trading, and in life in general, there are a ton of different types of mistakes you can make. Intelligent people know that you can learn from others’ mistakes instead of your own. Education is what allows you to learn from others mistakes. There are thousands of trading books out there for you to read. Here are some books I recommend reading before getting started. These books are written by other traders and trading coaches who have made every mistake there is to make in trading.
Learn as much as you can about trading before you jump in. This may seem like obvious advice, but so many new traders don’t do it. They think it is easy money and they open an account right away because they think they are smart enough to make money in the stock market without studying anything. You may learn that trading may not be what you thought it to be. Education is a great start, but getting direct mentorship from someone after you get educated on the basics of trading will shorten your learning curve even more.
Find Mentorship
Mentorship was the difference between me being a losing trader and me becoming profitable. Before I found Paul, I couldn’t figure out how to make money consistently from trading. And I had been trying for almost 5 years. I had plenty of education and knowledge about the stock market. I just didn’t have a mentor to guide me to give me an outside look at what I was doing wrong. Once I started working with Paul, I started to see immediate improvements to my trading. He told me exactly what I was doing wrong that was preventing me from being a consistent trader, and what I needed to do to fix it.
It is difficult to look at yourself and your flaws objectively. Other people will often see issues in you that you overlook. For this reason, mentorship in trading can drastically reduce your learning curve. For me mentorship gave me the guidance I needed to become a profitable trader. If I found a mentor when I started trading, it probably would’ve saved me years of unnecessary struggle and wasted money.
Record & Study Your Trading Data
This is the most boring part of becoming a successful trader, but yet the most important. You have to record every trade you take, study your old trades, and journal about your trading every day. You will never be able to see what mistakes you are making if you don’t study your own trading data. Traders who don’t study their trading data are not profitable. I have never met a trader who didn’t study their data meticulously everyday, even when they got profitable.
You can use trading journaling software like Tradervue and Edgewonk where you can upload executions from your broker. When looking at your trading data, study your best trades and figure out what they have in common. Figure out what you need to do to replicate them. Study your losing trades and figure out what they have in common. Figure out what are common causes of them, and eliminate them from your trading. Your data will show you where your edge is.
Did you check out day 2 of our Momo Trader Series? Yesterday we talked about ‘The Three Phases Of Successful Trading‘.
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