The Long Road of Day trading

Everyone’s journey is different, for some it may be dark, for some it may be lit. It is all what you make of it.

In this post today we will be talking about the journey of day trading and just how long it can be, it will be summed up in these few topics:

• Beginners luck
• Learning
• Learned
• The comeback
• The arrival

Beginners Luck

Beginners luck exists in this field of work just like an any other field, when you first begin it’s a sort of luck you acquire because of your ignorance. I remember when I first began, almost like it was yesterday: I won my first few trades trading the US dollar against the Mexican peso (USDMXN), with those wins I 5x my initial investment of $50 turning it to $250 in my sleep! That was the beginning of it all, that was the beginning of the love for this newly found niche that I found out about through a distant friends Instagram post. I honestly had no clue what I was doing besides the knowledge that I acquired from trading stocks in the past, I knew the basics: buy low, and sell high. I did just that and ever since then I was hooked, the funny thing is I never would’ve thought I’d get to the point in knowledge of where I am today. It wasn’t exactly a goal when I first began, I didn’t know there was anything to be learned because all I did was press a button, go to sleep and boom there’s money. You don’t start the learning process until you experience losses, in fact most never begin the learning process because they feel deep down inside that the market did it to them. This is where the progression will begin for you if you want to make this a career for yourself, in the beginning it’s more exciting its exhilarating even. It’s something new so it feels good to be seemingly “good” at day trading when you first begin, once you pass through this stage of excitement you will begin to see the long road you have ahead of you. So buckle up, and get ready to be taken on a ride of a lifetime.

Learning

I call this the learning portion simply because that’s exactly what it will be for however long it takes, notice how I didn’t give a specific timeframe. This is because with trading, you technically are always learning, it just depends on what it’s about. In this stage you are learning more about what it means to be a trader, and naturally how to win and prevent losses. The learning stage doesn’t exactly mean you won’t be profitable, if you are profitable that just means you have a lot to learn at a rapid pace because disaster can strike at any moment with the lack of knowledge. For me I was fortunate during my learning stage, I was blessed with the ability to make profit of a strategy I cultivated in my dorm room one winter in North Dakota. It just so happened that what I began to piece together in my mind from things I heard older traders say and from what I had seen more profitable traders do began to work. This was a blessing but also it blinded me from what there was to learn about trading, I mean truly trading. My first 6 months within the market I had made over 6 figures 2 times over, and at that point in my life I felt that I knew all there was to trading. You couldn’t literally tell me nothing I was so deep into my own career that it was impossible to see what there was to learn, until I began incurring losses, blowing accounts and having losing streaks. The thing about the learning stage is whatever side that you are on; whether it be in profit or in loss it will be painful. There’s no way around it. The learning stage is the foundation for your success, it all depends on what materials you decide to use to build upon. If you decide to take the easy way through and build your foundation of knowledge out of indicators, Youtube videos and signals then it will be a hard fall for you considering this is the equivalent of building a house out of straw. The learning stage is where you should cultivate a strategy or even strategies and develop a trading plan to supplement this including risk management, daily schedule, entry and exit strategy. This will prepare you correctly for your next stage.

Learned

This stage is very simply summarized with the title of learned, that is because you’ve gone through the rookie mistakes, you’ve gone through the learning stage and now this is where your foundation will be tested: whether this be a prop firm challenge, building an account or trading for a family member this is where you will learn just how strong the knowledge which you’ve acquired in the learning stage is good enough to continue your career. The downside to this is if your foundation is weak, you will have to go back to the learning stage and begin from square one all over again. This is why it pays to have a mentor or access to an academy of some sort because you have proven resources that have stood the test of time and can continue to stand the test of time as a strong rigid structure. When you are sent back to square one, unfortunately you don’t go back to the beginners luck stage because you are no longer ignorant of what the market can do on both ends of the spectrum. You’d have acquired emotions around the market like FOMO, the fear of missing out. The fear of leaving money on the table, and the fear of being wrong. This alone can keep traders in the learning process loop for years until they finally break it by repairing their psychology first then developing or learning a trading strategy they can trust themselves to work every time like an automaton. When you are tested the ideal outcome you’d like to have is passing, you’d like to have the prop firm account in your name, the flipped account and the happy family member who believed in you. But as I’ve stated this is only achievable if you’ve learned the right things to create that strong foundation to weather the storm of time. Passing this stage will give you the confidence to truly thrive and persevere during the next stage.

The Comeback

Here in this stage, I could almost call this the redemption period. This period is for all the people who didn’t believe in you, for all those nights you stayed up learning about the markets. All the books you read on psychology to help you perform at an even higher level, all the tests you’ve run with your strategy whether that be real-time testing or back testing. This is where you show exactly what you’ve been working on, because now you’re in the famed comeback stage. If you’ve watched rocky or even heard about it, everyone loves a good comeback story: you’ll be able to describe your failures and show how you bounced back from them unphased as if you’re a living legend(think about it, you probably are!). You’ll be able to explain to people in detail what your strategy is, what your trading plan consists of, what time you trade, what is your normal risk to reward ratio, what is your entry and exit strategy and things you do to stay out of your own way when applying your system. This is what the comeback stage feels like, it is the rising action to the climax of your story. In this stage you’ll feel like you’re on top of the world but will consciously know that you’re not there yet, you can create massive amounts of progress here. I mean irregular amounts of progress, talking 100x, 200x, even 1000x what you’d normally do because all of the actions you’ve done in the learning stage have compounded through the learned stage which gave you this larger than life confidence to continue to push through and now you’ve arrived with the prop firm accounts, the flipped accounts and now your family is asking you how did you do it so fast(as if they didn’t see you studying late night all the time). That’s what’s so exciting about the comeback stage, is that it’s the period where you can begin to say “I told you so” and people will begin to believe the words which you speak, they’ll even line up just to get a question answered by you because now you’re respected in the space of day trading for doing one thing: persevering.

The Arrival

The arrival, some can label it as boring… I’d like to label it peaceful. When you’re here everything that you said you would do has been done, all your goals that you once had when you were in the learning stage have now been completed. There’s really nothing more to do, because now everything you acquired in the learning stage is far beyond the learned confidence. It’s now apart of your identity, you can’t see yourself not doing the things which you’ve set in place. They’ve become habits just like brushing your teeth and taking a shower, you would feel out of equilibrium if you didn’t do them. The arrival is where you will have your reflection period and it may be the most emotional part of your life, because of all the moments that will pass by in your mind like a movie of your journey. You will remember the first time you put on a trade, the first time you won, the first time you loss, the late nights in the learning stage, the denials from family members, the lack of belief from everyone around you, the blown accounts, the jokes they made about you for believing so much in what you couldn’t show for yet besides your notes and previous trades put on. This will pass you by and should motivate you to inspire others along the rest of your journey, this is what it looks like for a day trader. The road has no final destination, because once you’ve arrived all you will do is continue walking.