I see day traders make several mistakes that are limiting their potential, or just flat out causing them to be losing traders. Unfortunately people don’t want to focus on fixing what is wrong, and keep looking for the magic solution to be better. Get rid of these 5 limiting behaviours and you’ll find yourself set up for success as a day trader.
Trading In The Evening / Being a Trading Addict
One “benefit” of the futures market is it’s open 23 hours a day 5 days a week. Problem is, most of the time it’s open is junk. The evening session is useless. Think about who trades at 8pm on a Sunday. Losing traders who just want action. Gamblers basically. So it’s a bunch of losing traders trading with each other.
The volume is low, there is nothing useful to trade. It truly is like gambling. The price push/pull supply/demand is easily manipulated, and losing traders just get run over.
Trade when there is volume. For futures, the US market session. There’s a reason I only trade 8am to 12pm each day and that’s it. And i manage to make over a million USD a year, go figure. It sure as hell wasn’t trading the evenings.
Paying For Courses
I learned futures trading 100% for free, no paid courses. You should do the same. All YouTube and Google, then testing and trying things out myself.
Reality is most paid courses are just junk. It’s information you COULD have found for free but were too lazy. Instead you paid some guy $10,000 for it.
Now’s a great time to plug my free futures trading course. Yes it’s 100% free, I don’t charge for anything. I don’t need to, I make my money trading. Visit my Free Futures Trading Course.
Last point on paid courses – I’ve yet to ever hear a good review of a paid course. I’ve seen about 100 paid courses negatively reviewed though. And the punchline is usually “I don’t feel I got my moneys worth, I could have learned these basics for free”. Bingo.
Paying For Trade Rooms
Similar idea to paid courses, you’ll be throwing away money on something that is useless.
I implore you to learn how to trade for yourself. Paid trade rooms are a) filled with people looking for a free hand out. “Tell me what trades to take please”. And put on by b) people looking to capitalize on group “a”. It’s easy to look like an expert to a bunch of newbies. Say some basic concepts, call out some trades. Trump up the trades that worked, down play the bad trades. Rinse and repeat. That sums up a trade room.
Really, please take a step back. Think about your long term trading plan, if its to just be hand fed trades by some supposed expert, you are going to fail in a horrible way.
Hanging Out With Losing Traders
The reality is most traders are losers. Unfortunately though a lot of them like to pretend they are winners. They give awful advice to new traders. They exaggerate their trading abilities. Ever heard the saying “misery loves company”? That’s losing traders. They congregate and want to basically bolster each other up, problem is they are all losers so it’s one loser affirming another.
Learn to recognize the dead weight traders and cut them out of your life like a bad relationship.
A great example – on some of the free Discord trading communities I spent some time on and realized most of the traders were going no where in life so I left. But I thought I’d check up on them 3 months later. It was the exact same losing traders, making the same losing calls, complaining about the same things. Misery loves company. And all of them will get no where in the world of traders. Get with winners.
Getting Mad/Angry/Upset Over A Losing Trade
The reality is you need to get to a point of taking most/all of your emotions out of trading. You won’t win a huge percentage of your trades. You really have to be okay with losing, learn how to lose. If you learn how to know when a trade isn’t going your way and to cut your loss quick. the pain of losing is minimal and eventually nil. You get to the point of knowing that you are so in control of your trading that you can eat the small loses and maximize the winners.
If you find yourself getting totally bent out of shape over a loser, then you are letting the losers go to far. A trade that could have been cut off at 3 ticks loser that you run 10 ticks against you is your fault. Own your mistakes.
Conclusion
These are just 5 things I see in the trading world that are quick hits. There’s lots of ways traders can up their game, but first things first focus on ditching the losing traders and paying supposed gurus. Once the trash is of your radar, you can focus on growing yourself as a trader and learning the proper way.
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Risk Disclosure:
Futures and forex trading contains substantial risk and is not for every investor. An investor could potentially lose all or more than the initial investment. Risk capital is money that can be lost without jeopardizing ones’ financial security or life style. Only risk capital should be used for trading and only those with sufficient risk capital should consider trading. Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results.
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Hypothetical performance results have many inherent limitations, some of which are described below. No representation is being made that any account will or is likely to achieve profits or losses similar to those shown; in fact, there are frequently sharp differences between hypothetical performance results and the actual results subsequently achieved by any particular trading program. One of the limitations of hypothetical performance results is that they are generally prepared with the benefit of hindsight. In addition, hypothetical trading does not involve financial risk, and no hypothetical trading record can completely account for the impact of financial risk of actual trading. for example, the ability to withstand losses or to adhere to a particular trading program in spite of trading losses are material points which can also adversely affect actual trading results. There are numerous other factors related to the markets in general or to the implementation of any specific trading program which cannot be fully accounted for in the preparation of hypothetical performance results and all which can adversely affect trading results.
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