One place that stars out 100% equal opportunity are the markets.
The stock, currency, future, option, and commodity markets do not care about your race or gender. It does not ask you to feel out a resume to see if you are qualified or educated enough to make money trading. It is one of the few professions where you can enter and play along with the professionals with no prior schooling or experience needed.
You can not go walk on to a NBA court and shoot baskets in a game or go try your hand at surgery on a whim because you think it is something you would like to learn how to do. In the markets you can take the other side of a trade with Paul Tudor Jones or sell a stock to William J, O’Neil even if you never know they were on the other side. Trading is a profession where you can place a trade and have a 50/50 chance of being right even if you have no idea what you are doing. You have the equal opportunity to make or lose money regardless of race, religious creed, or gender. Well at least you do at first.
However, even though in the short term markets are equal opportunity, in the long term the markets start to discriminate against those with no patience, they enter bad trades, and those that do not manage risk, the markets take much more from them when they lose than those who do manage their risk. The markets systematically take money from traders that trade a system or method that does not work. The markets over the long term discriminate between those that can trade and those who can’t. Good traders are on the winning side more and bad traders are on the losing side more. Good traders manage risk, trade a robust system, and have confidence in what they are doing. Bad traders are gamblers, making big bets, trading on emotions instead of systems, and are not consistent in their method.
Even with the easy entry into the markets new traders must respect the profession, they must study. To be successful new traders must put in the time with charts, books, questions, trading, and perseverance. Even though it is easy to jump in and trade it is not as easy to pull money out and keep it. You will only get out of trading what you put into it.
It is my hope that this blog will truly help new traders get to good trader, then to rich trader.