My trading journey—
How it started vs. how it's going... 10 things I realized over the years:

1. Anyone can do this! I'm not particularly smart - and don't need to be!

2. You need staying power. You must stay in the game to learn and grow. Show up! Good or bad outcome, keep taking your trades. Work for your mastery.

I'm a REAL trader with a PROVEN track record.

Here's something I wish I understood earlier: First some context:

I fell in love with trading when I was 17. (1999)

Begun trading for a living in 06.

I now trade for myself and a close circle of family and friends.

But I want to go bigger soon and possibly start a hedge fund.

The past couple of months, trading has been pretty tough for me performance-wise.

I obviously like to make money on a day-by-day, or even month-by-month basis—who doesn't?!

But I try as much as possible to not have such goals. I'm at least 90% systematic ... ... in my trading, and for me these figures are just random draws from a distribution of returns.

So, there's no point agonizing over them.

As a portfolio manager, in terms of what I look at every day when evaluating my trading, I just want to make sure that:

Not gonna pretend everything is fine and dandy.

On the stock trading front, I'm in a controlled drawdown—my day trading account is up, but my swing trading account is down and I'm now in cash licking my wounds.

My crypto portfolio looks like hell...

Not a pleasant feeling. So, if you're losing money, know that you're not alone.

I don't know how many of you need to hear this.

Although our skin colors, experiences, and life circumstances might be different, pain is the same.

And you are not alone in that pain!

I'm often asked if I use psychedelics.

I have tried it in the past, but it's not something I want to use on a regular basis.

I know a guy who's a psychedelic enthusiast.

Over time, I saw him completely go from enlightened to delusional. At first, he benefitted a lot from his use.

Helped him heal trauma, get over stuff that was hard to digest, dissolve his ego...

You could definitely see the positive impact this had on him. He always had a lot of new insights to share and a different perspective on life.

As a trader, a well-adjusted mindset is often the difference between winning and losing.

Here are 20 Principles that, if embraced and lived by, will change your life and trickle down into your trading.

🧵👇 1.-
Try to figure out what you want in life as early as possible.

I'm often asked why I don't share my technical analysis.

Here's why I don't. 🧵👇 1.-
First of all, my focus is trading psychology. I write about and teach on the mindset component of trading because it's closest to my heart and mind.

The topic is personally meaningful to me because I've had to face my own destructive tendencies in the market

When you trade a system with a positive EV, you are essentially a little privately owned casino.

The system is the edge.

You rely on math and rules, and the process of trading is boring and dull … but it’s profitable. When you trade a strategy that involves thinking, observation, discretion, intuition, you’re like a casino patron.

Your knowledge, intuition, and experience are the edge.

Good question. When I talk about focusing on the long term, I'm usually referring to leveraging the law of large numbers.

And this is relevant for day traders too.

https://twitter.com/ZaheerAnwari/status/1412396627508269057

Day trading can be one of the most time-saving, energy-saving, and profitable thing one can do.

IF you're doing it well.

But it's very easy to NOT do it well.

This is just my personal experience. If you want to grow fast, just don't go tunnel vision on the trading psychology stuff like me. It's very slow to take off and not as profitable. 1/x

https://twitter.com/JimHickenbottom/status/1364301613997957130

We're in a field predominantly populated by men who just want to make a quick buck and are not interested in the whole trading psychology aspect of it all―even though this is arguably a big part of the trading puzzle. 2/x

Thoughts on this year―Thread 1/10

2020 has been one hell of a year in terms of risk and opportunity.

It’s been a boon for me, personally.

I think this needs a thread.

https://twitter.com/TradingComposur/status/1329153415885295617

1/x

The market doesn’t care about your need to perform.

If you trade long enough, you‘ll eventually see this pan out: sometimes you‘ll get a handful of losing months in a row, regardless of your strategy's expectancy and potential.

Mark down my words.

This year has been one hell of a ride.

Personally, I'm doing pretty well for myself, so I can't complain, but life has been hard out there for a lot of people.

Many have lost their jobs and are struggling to make ends meet. These days I see more and more people coming into this field. Perhaps one reason is that trading is one of those pandemic-proof professions.

Not only that, it actually benefits from chaos ―this is when you stand to make the most.

We delve into this thoroughly in the Trading Psychology Mastery Course.

But in short:

https://twitter.com/IamNotAATrader/status/1314627488920735745

1. The market is deterministic. Nothing inherently random about it.

Thread.

Often people come into trading and want results fast.

That's really the wrong mentality to have, and personally, I don't teach this in the least.

When I had this mentality, I ran into a number of issues and never got to my goal of being consistent. It's only when I really embraced the fact that it's going to take time and that I need to enjoy and accept the process of learning (which includes failing a bunch of times) that I was able to hit not some monetary goal but consistency.

Trading is difficult to master.

Anyone can learn a technical signal in an hour or two, but the right mindset takes years to develop –possibly a lifetime. That’s why most traders consistently lose.

They don’t know how to handle losses; they focus on the short term ups and downs; they get demoralized easily, and, eventually, they blow up and quit.

A Random Thread.

Humans are perpetually dissatisfied. As we obtain more of what we want, we grow thirstier, more attached, and hardly content.

This is something I'm observing in my own life. Financial freedom is a curious thing. It's made me harder to please; I don't seem to appreciate the little things to the degree that I perhaps used to.

Thoughts On Current Market Conditions –A Thread.

In my opinion, traders need to clearly understand what market condition they want to trade and specialize in. On a strategic level, it doesn't really matter since a simple adjustment in position size can help prevent dramatic fluctuations in one's equity curve.

But on a psychological level, market condition is a parameter worth considering.

You never want to give the market the power to make you act like a cornered animal.

Yet there are a few things that people do that virtually guarantee that they'll end up behaving this way. 1. Not having a system.

14 SIGNS YOU'RE A GOOD TRADER — A THREAD

1./ You are an independent thinker. 2./ Rather than succumbing to your emotions, you manage them skillfully, which helps you make wiser choices in trading.

1./ I've recently been offered a full-time job at a trading/investment firm which would have me supervise a group of traders, helping them maintain stability of mind, advising them, and monitoring their performance.

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2./ Sounds super cool but after sleeping on it, I decided to kindly decline the offer. To me, self-employment is true freedom even though it comes with a caveat: Uncertainty.