Wednesday, February 10, 2010

45 Ways to Avoid Losing Money Trading FOREX, by Jimmy Young

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astagold

30-12-2008, 01:35 AM

1) Knowledge Deficiency – Most new FOREX traders don’t take the time to learn what drives currency rates (primarily fundamentals). When news or a statement is due out they must close out their positions and sit out the best trading opportunities. They are taught to only trade after the market calms down. So essentially they miss the whole move and then trade the random noise that follows a fundamental price move. Just think for a moment about technically trading the aftermath of a price move; there is no potential.
2) Overtrading - Trading often with tight stops and tiny profit targets will only make the broker rich. The desire to “just” make a few hundred dollars a day by locking in tiny profits whenever possible is a losing strategy.
3) Over leveraged - Leverage is a two way street. The brokers want you to use high leverage because that means more spread income because your position size determines the amount of spread income; the bigger the position the more spread income the broker earns.
4) Relying on Others – Real traders play a lone hand; they make their own decisions and don’t rely on others to make their trading decisions for them; there is no halfway; either trade for yourself or have someone else trade for you.
5) Stop Losses – Putting tight stop losses with retail brokers is a recipe for disaster. When you put on a trade commit to a reasonable stop loss limit that allows your trade a fair chance to develop.
6) Demo Accounts – Broker demo accounts are a shill game of sorts; they’re not as time sensitive as real accounts and therefore give the impression that time sensitive trading systems, such as short-term moving average crossovers can be consistently profitably traded; once you start dealing with real money reality is quick to set in.
7) Trading During Off Hours – Bank FX traders, option traders, and hedge funds have a huge advantage during off hours; they can push the currencies around when no volume is going through and the end game is new traders get fleeced trying to trade signals. There is only one signal during off hours – stay out.
8) Trading a Currency, Not a Pair – Being right about a currency is half a trade; success or failure depends upon being right about the second currency that makes up the pair.
9) No Trading Plan - Make money is not a trading plan. A trading plan is a blueprint for trading success; it spells out what you see your edge as being; if you don’t have an edge, you don’t have a plan, and likely you’ll wind up a statistic (part of the 95% of new traders that lose and quit).
10) Trading Against Prevailing Trend – There is a huge difference between buying cheaply on the way down and buying cheaply. What was a low price quickly becomes a high price when you’re trading against the trend.


astagold

30-12-2008, 01:35 AM

11) Exiting Trades Poorly – If you put on a trade and it’s not working make sure you exit properly; don’t compound the damage. If you’re in a winning trade don’t talk yourself out of the position because you’re bored or want to relieve stress; stress is a natural part of trading; get use to it.
12) Trading Too Short-term – If you’re profit target is less than 20 points don’t do the trade; the spread you pay to enter the trade makes the odds way against you when you go for these tiny profits.
13) Picking Tops and Bottoms - Looking for bargains works well at the supermarket but not trading foreign exchange; try to trade in the direction the price is going and you’re results will improve.
14) Being Too Smart – The most successful traders I know are high school graduates. They keep it simple and don’t look beyond the obvious; their results are excellent.
15) Not Trading Around News Time – Most of the big moves occur around news time. The volume is high and the moves are real; there is no better time to trade fundamentally or technically than when news is released; this is when the real money adjusts their positions and as a result the prices changes reflect serious currency flow (compared to quiet times when Bank traders rule the market with their customer order flow.
16) Ignore Technical Condition – Determining whether the market is over-extended long or over-extended short is a key determinant of near time price action. Spike moves often occur when the market is all one way.
17) Emotional Trading – When you don’t pre-plan you’re trades essentially it’s a thought and not an idea; thoughts are emotions and a very poor basis for doing trades. Do people generally say intelligent things when they are upset and emotional; I don’t think so.
18) Lack of Confidence – Confidence only comes from successful trading. If you lose money early in your trading career it’s very difficult to gain true confidence; the trick is don’t go off half-cocked; learn the business before you trade.
19) Lack of Courage to Take a Loss – There is nothing macho or gutsy about riding a loss, just stupidity and cowardice. It takes guts to accept your loss and wait for tomorrow to try again. Getting married to a bad position ruins lots of traders. The thing to remember is the market does crazy things often so don’t get married to any one trade; it’s just a trade. One good trade will not make you a trading success; rather it’s monthly and annual performance that defines a good trader.
20) Not Focusing on the Trade at Hand – There is no room for fantasizing in successful trading. Counting up and mentally spending profits you haven’t made yet is mental masturbation and does you no good. Same with worrying about a loss that hasn’t happened yet. Focus on your position and have a reasonable stop loss in place at the time you do the trade. Then be like an astronaut – sit back and enjoy the ride; no sense worrying because you have no real control; the market will do what it wants to do.


astagold

30-12-2008, 01:36 AM

21) Interpreting FOREX News Incorrectly – Fact is the press only has a very superficial understanding of the news they are reporting and tend to focus on one element and miss the point. Learn to read the source documents and understand it for real.
22) Lucky or Good – Your account balance changes don’t tell you the whole story about your trading; fact is if your taking a lot of risk and making money you will eventually crash and burn. Look at the individual trade details; focus on your big loses and losing streaks. Ask yourself this; if I had a couple of consecutive losing streaks or a couple of consecutive big loses, how would my account balance look. Generally, traders making money without big daily loses have the best chance of sustaining positive performance. The others are accidents waiting to happen.
23) Too Many Charity Trades – When you make money on a well thought out trade don’t give back half on a whim; invest your profits from good trades on the next good trade.
24) Courage Under Fire – When a policeman breaks down the door to a drug dealers apartment he is scared but he does it anyway. When a fireman climbs onto the roof of a burning building he is scared but does it anyway; and gets the job done. Same with trading; it’s ok to be scared but you have to pull the trigger; no trigger – no trades – no profits – no trader.
25) Quality Trading Time – I suggest 3 hours a day of quality, focused trading time; that’s about all your brain allows. When your trading being 100% focused; half way is bullshit’ it doesn’t work. Don’t even think that time spent in front of the computer watching the rates has any correlation to profitability; it doesn’t. Spend less time but when your trading be 100% focused on trading.
26) Rationalizing – Killer. Absolute Killer. Put your trade on and let it run. If it hits your reasonable pre-determined stop your out. Think of yourself as a prizefighter; you just got knocked out. Moving your stop is like getting up after being crushed with a knockout blow; it’s pointless; things will only get worse. Don’t ignore the obvious; your wrong – get out. Come back the next day and try again. A small loss will not hurt you; a catastrophic loss will.
27) Mixing Apples and Oranges – Have you ever done this; you see the EURUSD trading higher so you buy GBPUSD because it “hasn’t moved yet”. That’s a mistake. Most of the time the reason the GBPUSD hasn’t moved yet is because its already overbought or some 4:30am UK news was bearish. Don’t mix apples and oranges; if EURUSD looks bid buy EURUSD.
28) Avoiding the Hard Trades – Bank FX traders have an axiom; the harder the trade is to do the better the trade. This I learned from experience; when I needed to buy EURUSD and it was hard to get them that’s when it’s necessary to pay up and get the business done. When it’s easy to get them then sit back and wait for better levels. So if your trying to get into a trade or more importantly get out of a trade don’t putz around for a few points; get your business done.
29) Too Much Detail – If your trading more than 2 indicators then you need to clean house. Having many indicators stifles trading and finds reasons not to trade. A setup and a trigger is all you need.
30) Giving Up Too Easy – Your first trade of the day may not be your best but certainly it’s no reason to quit. I have a preset daily trading limit and I use it; you can’t make money by making excuses; getting trades wrong is natural and should be expected.
31) Jumping the Gun – Don’t be penny wise and dollar foolish; wait for your trade signal to be clear; put on your trade and give it a decent size stop loss so that you don’t get knocked out by random noise. Do trades don’t’ buy lottery tickets (extremely tight stops).
32) Afraid to Take a Loss - trading is not personal; it’s business. Don’t think that a poor trade is a reflection on you. It could be your just ahead of your time or a commercial order hits the market and temporarily creates a small unexpected move. Again, place your stop beforehand and NEVER increase your pre-determined risk; if it’s going bad it will probably get worse; I think that’s Einstein “in motion stays in motion…”
33) Over-Relying on Risk Reward – There is zero advantage in risk reward; if you put a 20 point stop and a 60 point profit your chances are probably 3-1 that you will lose; actually with the spread its more like 4 to 1 (from entry point if it goes down 17 points you lose or up 63 you win; 17/63 is close to 4-1).
34) Trading for Wrong Reasons – Because the EURUSD is going up is not in itself a reason to buy. Buying EURUSD because its not moving so little risk is even worse; you’re paying the toll (spread) without even a hint that you will get a directional move. If your bored don’t trade; the reason your bored is there is no trade to do in the first place.
35) Rumors – Rumors are rumors almost 100% of the time; think about where in the motion you heard the rumor; if EURUSD is up 50 points in last 15 minutes and the rumor is dollar negative, well then you missed it. Whenever you trades determine where in the motion you are entering.
36) Trading Short-term Moving Average Crossovers – This is the money sucker of the century. When the shorter term moving average cross the longer term moving average it only means that the average price in the short run is equal to the average price in the longer run. For the life of me I cannot understand why this is bullish or bearish. Easy to set up on software, complete with lights, bells and whistles, and good for the seller getting thousands for the software but in terms of creating profit it’s a zero.
37) Stochastic – Another money sucker. Personally I think this indicator is used backwards; when it first signals an overdone condition that’s when I think the big spike in the “overdone” currency pair occurs. To be overbought means strong and oversold means weak. Try buying on the first sign of overbought and selling on the first sign of oversold; you’ll be with the trend and likely have identified a move with plenty of juice left. So if %k and %d are both crossing 80; buy! (Same on sell side; sell at 20)
38) Wrong Broker – A lot of FOREX brokers are horrible; get a good one. Read forums and chats in several different places to get an unbiased opinion.
39) Simulated Results – Watch out for “black box” systems; these are trading systems that don’t divulge how the trade signals are generated. Great majority of them are absolute garbage. They show you a track record of extraordinary results but think about it; if you could build a trading system with half a dozen filters using the benefit of hindsight, couldn’t you too come up with a great system. Of course going forward is an entirely different story. High-speed number crunching capabilities allows for building great hindsight trading systems; BEWARE.


astagold

30-12-2008, 01:37 AM

40) Inconsistency – Every business (FOREX trading included) requires a business plan (trading plan). Unless you have taken the time to write down a set of rules that you can and will follow, it’s likely your trading will remain unfocused and directionless. Make a plan, have rules, follow them set goals that are realistic and you will achieve them.
41) Master of None – Focus on one currency for technical trading; each currency has a unique way of trading and unless you get intimate with it you will never truly understand its underlying idiosyncrasies. Don’t spread yourself too thin – focus – master one currency at a time.
42) Thinking Long Term – Don’t do it. Stay in the moment. Especially if you’re a day trader. It doesn’t matter what happens next week or next month, if your trading with 30 to 50 point stops restrict your thought process to what’s happening right now. That is not to stay the long-term trend is not important; it is to say the long-term trend will not always help you when your trading a significantly shorter time frame.
43) Overconfidence – Trading is not easy; statistics show 95% failure rate. If your doing well don’t take your success for granted; always be on the lookout for ways to improve what you’re doing.
44) Getting Pumped Up – The trick is to maintain an even keel; when you are in a trade you want to think exactly as you would if you didn’t have a trade on. To do this requires a relaxed disposition; this is not a football game; don’t get psyched up; relax and try to enjoy it.
45) Staying in the Game – I don’t recommend demo trading because traders learn bad habits when trading with play money. I also don’t think “letting it all hang out” right away is wise either. Start off doing trades and taking risk that is relatively small but still makes a difference to you if you win or lose; about a quarter to a third of what you expect to reach as your trading matures is reasonable.
Retired proven professional Bank FOREX trader with over 20 years of hands-on FOREX trading experience.


roziex

04-01-2009, 05:30 PM

info yg baik nie


bosspro76

04-01-2009, 05:57 PM

good job bro... thanks for ur info..


astagold

04-01-2009, 06:08 PM

tq :D:D
setuju dgn kebanyakan pendapat yg diberikan, tapi bukan semua la :D


feroz3004

04-01-2009, 06:16 PM

Info yg bgs..:)paid:)paid


l3800

18-01-2009, 08:28 PM

36)- Trading Short-term Moving Average Crossovers –
This is the money sucker of the century. When the shorter term moving average cross the longer term moving average it only means that the average price in the short run is equal to the average price in the longer run. For the life of me I cannot understand why this is bullish or bearish. Easy to set up on software, complete with lights, bells and whistles, and good for the seller getting thousands for the software but in terms of creating profit it’s a zero.
yang ni aku setuju...


astagold

06-02-2009, 03:08 AM

letak kat sini dulu, senang nanti nak print :D


astagold

06-02-2009, 03:14 AM

pun best buat bahan bacaan.


forerx

12-07-2009, 02:16 AM

thanks for ur info..


astagold

13-07-2009, 12:42 PM

The cowboy approach to trading Forex is a wonderful recipe for inviting disaster, but many new traders do often attempt this as a means to the “Get Rich Quick” dream. What they invariably get instead, is a blown account (and one happy broker who now has their money).
A broking house related in an article recently that one of their most successful traders is a “balls to the wall” kind of guy. He began with a $1 million kitty, trades very large position sizes, and regularly pulls in the kind of numbers that make your head spin. He frequently changes his mind, flipping from long to short and one currency pair to another within seconds, which apparently drives his trading partners crazy. Large position sizes do it for him. Recommended? Absolutely not! (Let’s remember that brokers have their own agenda to work.)
It’s very hard to believe that this guy “began” trading Forex for the first time with $1 million and automatically succeeded. Far more likely he earned his stripes elsewhere on a much (MUCH) smaller account for a period of several years, then moved into a larger account using the broker relating this story, which is where this trader’s story “began” for the broker concerned.
Another trader within my acquaintance recently related the story of his transition from demo to live. He made a classic mistake, demo trading on a $100k account (because he liked the hit of seeing the zero’s spinning around), having a great time. Suggestions that demo trading the amount of his anticipated live capital was essential, went unheeded. He then went live on a $10k account, and promptly blew it up. He refunded a second time with another $10k, blew that one up too. Now he is trading a micro-account, and finally the lesson has sunk in – trade small to start with – give yourself room to get through the apprenticeship without the damage.
The big difference between demo and live is just one word - pressure. Some traders can handle the pressure, others can’t. Small position sizes accomplish several important things –
+ Small position sizes are the optimum way to contain the pressure. Small position size, small pressure. Big position size, big pressure. This is a critically important tool for managing the emotions of trading.
+ Small position sizes make allowance for the knowledge vacuum, the “what don’t I presently know about this, that I need to know” factor.
+ Small position sizes link in to the “Less is More” approach. A little trade at the right moment, goes a long way. In Forex, it doesn’t take a big position size to make a big return on investment. A small trade, well placed, can deliver big returns.
+ Small position sizes guarantee preservation of your account capital, and as such are the primary tool for insuring yourself against losses.
+ Small position sizes ensure market longevity. No money, no trading.
Many experienced traders recommend small position sizes relative to the size of the account (not more than 2%) and regardless of market experience, for good reason.
Position size is however contingent upon two things. First, the level of risk the trader is comfortable with and second, the level of proficiency the trader has. Some traders are comfortable with high levels of risk, but under-estimate the second part of the equation, their proficiency.
If the trader is good at what they do, has a strong track record of success, an increased level of risk-reward can be a legitimate strategy. Some experienced/professional traders risk up to 20% of their account seed capital per total open positions (usually trading a basket of currencies simultaneously). The premise is that Forex is a speculative high risk instrument, it’s not the place for the bread and butter money of other investments, risk is the business du jour - as a successful professional trader they have literally “earned” the privilege to trade higher levels of risk.
The end purpose of longevity in the Forex market is to gain mastery of the instrument, to trade it with a high degree of accuracy and proficiency, accumulating consistently successful trades. Making it through the apprenticeship to reach the success objective is made possible by one thing, managing position size well.
Position size matters. Regardless of account size, trading style or market experience, it’s the key to unlocking and maintaining long-term success. In the early stages especially, it’s the key to survival.
Small position sizes also give the trader room to grow gradually into a place of comfort in coping with the pressure that comes with trading larger numbers as the success rate improves.


astagold

19-07-2009, 02:35 PM

A chess player analyzing the board for the next move; fighter pilots maneuvering their planes to get a lock on enemy aircraft; a baseball player tracking the release of the ball from the pitcher’s arm; ballet dancers executing their leaps; an oncologist diagnosing a rare form of cancer; a bodybuilder sculpting a small muscle group to achieve symmetry: all of these are examples of performance activities. They are also examples of fields that have been widely researched in the past two decades, uncovering important clues as to the factors that create successful performance.
This research raises fascinating questions: What makes expert performers different from less successful ones? Is expert performance a function of inherited personality traits and skills, or can it be cultivated in the proper environments? Which techniques has research found to dramatically improve performance? Will the performance-enhancing techniques that benefit chess grandmasters and Olympic athletes also assist traders? The book I am currently writing will tackle all these questions and more. This article has a more modest aim: It will draw upon research studies with chess experts to identify the one most important thing traders can do to accelerate their development.
Trading as a Performance Activity
Not all trading is a performance activity, of course. A computer can be programmed to enter, manage, and exit positions, but the computer does not perform in the same way as the athlete, dancer, or fighter pilot. Performance, in the psychological sense, begins with the human element in competition. Humans choose when to take action and when to refrain; they can select various courses of action on different occasions and can invent new strategies when needed. The trading computer does not have good days and bad days—only profitable ones and unprofitable ones. Human traders can perform poorly even if they make money, and they can have good days even when they’re in the red. That is because performance is a function of the chosen actions of performers, the correctness of those choices, and the skill with which the actions are carried out. Once an element of discretion enters into trading, it becomes a performance activity: one in which outcomes are dependent upon the choices of the performer.
There are several common features of performance activities:
* They can be executed well or poorly. Activities that are performed well on a consistent basis require a high degree of skill. A lucky outcome, such as winning a lottery, is not a skilled performance.
* There are individuals who can be identified as expert performers. With very rare exception, expert performers are ones who have developed their talents over time. Most expert performers undergo specialized training to cultivate their talents.
* They require a specialized knowledge base. The knowledge may be the “how-to” knowledge of a gymnast or the research knowledge of a scientific researcher. To perform well in a field, a person must master the information and skills specific to that field.
Trading, as a performance activity, has much in common with chess. It is competitive, requiring a high degree of concentration and strategy. It also features a limited number of actions that, in combination, create a large array of possible strategies and actions. This makes both activities easy to learn, but difficult to master. Chess can be played in lightning fashion, with very little time between moves, or it can allow players many minutes to plan moves—or even days (postal chess). Trading can also be conducted on a very short-term basis or can be planned and executed over hours or days. These similarities make chess an excellent starting point for examining the performance dynamics of trading, especially since chess is one of the performance fields most studied by researchers.


astagold

19-07-2009, 02:45 PM

The Performance Ingredients of Chess
A well-replicated finding in chess research is that the memory processes of experts are different from those of non-experts. One intriguing set of studies took chessboard arrangements from a past tournament games and briefly showed them to expert players and novices. Afterward, the expert chess players were able to recall the positions of many more pieces than the novices. When the two groups were shown chessboards with randomly arranged pieces, however, their recall of the positions of the pieces was quite limited. The researchers’ conclusion was that experts do not have better memories than non-experts; rather, they have better memories for meaningful relationships among chess pieces. Instead of remembering where each individual piece was on the board, the experts viewed the board as clusters of pieces and remembered these. When the board was randomly arranged, there were no meaningful clusters of pieces and the experts had no effective means for encoding their information.
How do expert chess players gain this ability to perceive meaningful patterns among pieces? Because chess players are given ratings based upon their tournament play, it is relatively easy to compare experts (masters and grandmasters) with less accomplished players. When a variety of factors are incorporated into multiple regression equations to predict chess ratings, two stand out as highly significant:
1. The number of books owned – Research conducted by Neil Charness and colleagues finds that the correlation between books owned by chess players and their current performance ratings was .53.
2. The cumulative number of hours spent in practice – Those same researchers found that the correlation between the amount of time spent in practice and current performance ratings was .60.
To appreciate these findings, it is necessary to understand what chess books are and how they are used. These texts typically break the game down into components (opening, endgame, defenses, etc.) and present historical games from tournaments, along with annotation from an expert author. Readers do not merely skim over these games; they learn specific opening or defensive sequences and then see how these were utilized in actual games. They recreate those games on their own boards and carefully play through the positions, so that they can see what the expert players saw. They also play through alternate sequences to observe where these might lead.
Interestingly, chess experts do not have significantly more chess-playing experience than non-experts. Rather, a higher percentage of the experience of experts is spent in the systematic practice of various facets of the game. Non-experts tend to spend a higher proportion of their time in games against similarly-skilled opponents. This experience neither exposes the learner to the moves of experts, nor does it provide time for a careful review of moves, exploration of alternate lines, etc. In the Charness work, the correlation between solitary practice and chess ratings is almost twice as high as the correlation between practice with others and ratings. This is because solitary practice with chess books allows learners to obtain chess knowledge in context. Instead of focusing on the moves of an opponent, learners encounter—again and again—those meaningful configurations of pieces that appear in the games of experts.
Enhancing Trading Performance
Students of trading are at a huge disadvantage relative to students of chess. Chess books document the performance of centuries of experts in actual tournament situations. Because of this, chess students can create and play through almost any challenging situation imaginable, drawing upon the accumulated wisdom of experts. Trading possesses no such database. Trading books, unlike chess texts, are not annotated compilations of the trading decisions of objectively rated experts. One cannot use trading books to recreate trading sessions or to systematically explore trading decisions and their alternatives. Chess books lend themselves to independent deliberative practice; trading books present ideas outside the context of actual trading.
As a result, traders tend to spend little time in the systematic practice that is the single greatest predictor of chess expertise—not to mention expertise in music, athletics, and dance. This violates a principle from the performance research that is so striking that it might even be called a law:
In every performance field, the development and maintenance of expertise requires a high ratio of time spent in practice relative to time spent in actual performance.
Athletes spend far more time working out, practicing, and scrimmaging than actually playing in competitive events. The same is true for chess masters, professional dancers, fighter pilots, and racecar drivers. Our analysis of chess expertise helps to explain this law. Only significant time spent in absorbing winning and losing chess enables players to internalize the patterns of play that distinguish experts from non-experts. The trader who spends more time trading than practicing trading is like the golfer who spends more time playing rounds with buddies than on the driving range, putting green, and in lessons. We all know golfers like that, and they are not the ones who make their living on the PGA tour.
This then leads us to the single most important step you can take to become an expert trader:
The expert trader needs to be able to review and re-experience markets and systematically rehearse facets of trading performance: entering, managing, and exiting positions.
Note that what I am suggesting is NOT paper trading. Paper trading is usually a following of the market in real time, accompanied by simulated trading decisions. Such paper trading does not allow traders to replay market action, review their decisions, test out alternatives, etc. It is this re-experiencing that cements learning, and it requires a database of market days similar to the database of tournament games utilized by chess books.
Think of each trading session as a chess game, and each game as a contest between two expert players named “Bull” and “Bear”. Every short-term swing in the market is a move by Bull or Bear that ultimately leads either to a victory for one of them or a draw. In tracking the moves of Bull and Bear, we can pause the match at any point and observe how each player exploits the weak moves of the other. With the aid of an electronic database that collates similar trading sessions, we can even explore how alternate moves by each side produce different outcomes. Moreover, we can play and replay the “games” (and their similar variants), seeing if our simulated trading decisions accurately reflect our reading of the strengths and weaknesses of the players’ positions.
How could we create such a database? Two methods stand out at present, and my hope is that software vendors will create even more:
1. Replay. Some programs, such as Ensign and e-Signal, allow users to replay market data at varying rates of speed. This permits repetition of a market day, so that paper trading can be accompanied by review and fresh practice. Programs that allow users to save and replay tick data are especially valuable, as this creates a library of trading sessions akin to the collections of chess games found in books.
2. Taping. Videotaping of one’s trading screens allows for unlimited review of market action and one’s trading decisions. It is not too far-fetched to imagine video-taping of simulated trading from video-taped data, creating feedback loops for learning. Over time, collections of these tapes form a library for study that would allow traders to practice trading almost any kind of market imaginable.
If this analysis has merit, then most of the services offered to traders in the popular media have limited value. Self-help techniques, exhortations regarding discipline, didactic presentations of patterns, and general rules and advice do not turn chess novices into experts, and there is no reason to believe they will advance the performance curve for traders. Knowledge and practice—and especially the direct experience of knowledge-in-practice—are the keys to the acquisition of expertise.
We commonly hear the statistic that 90% of all traders ultimately fail. If this is so, it is not because they lack the right personality traits, indicator patterns, or software programs. Rather, they have failed to structure their learning to facilitate expertise. This is one of the most important lessons we can learn from the decades of research and hundreds of studies on the topic of performance. The path to our greatness lies not only in performing, but in the systematic work we put into performance. The next great advance in trading technology, I believe, will be the creation of dynamic learning environments that serve as the electronic equivalent of chess books. The learning platforms we rig for ourselves today will pale in comparison to tomorrow’s technology, but that matters little to those pursuing self-development. The single most important step you can take, Ayn Rand realized, is to fight for tomorrow, so that you might live in it today.
Brett N. Steenbarger, Ph.D. is Director of Trader Development for Kingstree Trading, LLC in Chicago and Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY.


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