There are many great setups from some of the world's best Traders in the world available for on the web- all of which have edge and provide a great living for their practitioners. Some such as breakouts, pullbacks, flags, pennants etc are simple and well known even to beginners
Unfortunately 95% of Traders are unable to Trade them profitably and waste their entire life in trying to discover one which they can. The problem is not in the setup per se but with other issues such as Capital Allocation, Position Sizing, Money Management and Psychology
All these issues appear to be very simple in nature, and can probably be summarized in one page, but turn out to be extremely difficult to implement in practice. To some extent they are counter intuitive to the way we are conditioned to think.
This can be fixed either thru proper Mentoring or thru a very deep and critical analysis of one's Trading activity which most find difficult to do because it is difficult to discern the repetitive patterns which cause us to lose.
Fixing these will make us good enough to make a decent living from the Markets. But the issues holding us back to get to the next level are far more complex and relate to our belief system which has been developed thru the sum of our cumulative experiences
So for instance if you received a severe electrical shock in your childhood, you may subconsciously be reluctant or even scared to engage with power points regardless of how safe they may be. Over a lifetime we accumulate scores of good and bad beliefs
Top Prop Firms spend millions of dollars consulting with psychologists like Dr Steenbarger to spend hours with their top Traders and identify bad beliefs and possibly replace them with good ones. But such expensive remedies are beyond the reach of most Retail Traders
But simple remedies to address part of the problem are. When I attended Dr Van Tharp's workshops, the first thing he made us do was list done our top ten beliefs. So maybe something like- hard work is essential to succeed in life.
He then proceeded to analyze and dissect each of these beliefs. Each belief opened up some avenues and closed others. Constantly repeating this process can be very helpful in improving our Trading by helping us determine how and how not we can Trade etc.
A constructive analysis of the Trading mistakes we make from time to time and linking them to areas in our belief system and then either discarding the harmful ones and replacing them with good ones or finding a workaround will take one's Trading to the next level
To illustrate how deep rooted our belief systems are and how difficult it is to change them, Dr Tharp relies on 2 great sources- The Geeta and a movie- The Matrix.
