Many new traders fail in the stock market simply because they rush in without putting in the proper time and discipline in doing their homework. Trading is a professional endeavor much like any other career, you will only get out of it what you put into it. There is no easy money, you will have to earn it by out witting, out playing, and out smarting the majority of other market participants.
You need to learn ten things to be a successful trader:
- How to manager your risk per trade.
- What systems and methods really make money over the long term.
- What system fits your personality and beliefs about the market.
- How much heat you can you handle. How big can you trade with out emotions taking over?
- You must learn how the market actually works, trends, flows, and functions.
- Learn to focus only on what makes money in the market, everything else is noise.
- Discover who the greatest traders of all time were and study how they operated.
- Find out what the best books on trading are and read them.
- Study the charts of the stocks you are trading to understand how it works with trends, support, resistance, and moving averages.
- Practice paper trading, simulated accounts, and trading small positions of real money until you have mastered your trading plan.
You must build yourself into a focused and disciplined trader. Your faith and self confidence must be so strong that you will succeed, the only question is when and how big will your account grow when you find yourself in the right market conditions trading the right system.
You should do so much work on building yourself up as a trader that when you are in that zone in the right market conditions as a ruled based discretionary trader that you are doing exactly what needs to be done to make money.
When trading in the zone you should feel like this: You know exactly what to do, because you did the homework.
But, for mechanical system traders your game is complete faith in your system and the discipline to follow it through all markets so you have the opportunity to win big with the conditions change.