Trading offers many benefits when compared to what you would call a normal career trajectory. It is one of the few professions where you can completely set your own agenda. The manner and timing of your engagement with the market are completely yours to choose – you may choose to be a position trader who builds large trend following positions that last for years or you may try your hand at scalping. The decision is up to you.
Trading is also the world’s most equal opportunity employer, the market doesn’t know about your background nor does it care. I understand that people will whinge about insider trading and markets being rigged but these are only excuses for poor performance. Insider trading in no way impacts the individual trader what impacts the individual trader is obviously the individual. And this is the greatest problem traders face. Just as trading allows you to set the tone and tenor of your engagement it also makes you completely responsible for the outcomes over the long term.
Occasionally you get blindsided by moves that run counter to your position but these are rare and should not be fatal unless you were playing double or nothing. It is this requirement for self-awareness and complete transparency when looking at yourself that defeats the majority of traders. For the majority of traders who struggle their internally generated reasoning for their failure runs along the line of excuses, they don’t have the right charting package, someone has not told them the right indicator to use or their broker is an idiot. At the centre of this is the trader who is unwilling to look inwards at the true source of their continued failure.
I have often thought rather whimsically that the greatest too in trading is the mirror but very few are willing to undergo the often painful psychological dissection required to move forward. It is always much easier to blame someone else.
