3 of the Hardest Lessons I Have Had to Learn About Trading

Today, I would like to talk about 3 of the hardest lessons I have had to learn about trading over the years.

Some of them may come as a complete surprise to you.

Some of them may completely change the way you view trading.

Some of them may give you an “aha” moment that will completely change your life.

1. I learned that to profit from trading, you do not need to be smart or have a very complex strategy.

I once thought that trading is very complex and is only meant for smart people.

One day, I came across this book titled Market Wizards, and this book changed my entire perspective about trading. In this book, the author Jack D. Schwager interviewed the world's successful and top traders, sharing what contributed to their success in trading.

While each trader has a slightly different view, they all boiled down to solid methodology + proper mental attitude = trading success.

In fact, I'm not the smartest student in the class. I even failed one of my subjects during my university too.

But that didn't stop me from trading. And because of trading, I'm able to enjoy my financial independence today.

I believe that anyone, including you, can be a successful trader. The question is how much do you want it？

2. I learned that more trades do not mean more profits.

A HARD lesson I learned that completely prevented me from being a successful trader was to think that trading requires a lot of time being in front of the computer, and I need to be taking a lot of trades to make money.

Heres the story of how I came to realize the truth - trading is more on quality, less on quantity.

Again, I came to realize this after reading the book titled One Good Trade by Mike Bellafiore. We are accustomed to having the impression that the more time we spent on something, the higher the return's gonna be. But it's actually not the case in trading.

The truth is the more time you spend staring at your charts and trades, the more difficult trading is gonna be, and thus the more mistakes you're gonna make.

Nowadays, I spend only an average of 30 minutes a day trading. Some days, only 5 minutes!

We trade so that we can have our financial independence and to spend the time doing the things we enjoy. Don't fall into the trap, thinking you need to spend a lot of time trading to profit from the market.

We focus on quality, not quantity.

3. I learned that trading is very safe if you know how to manage your risk.

Alright, one last hard lesson before we wrap up this article! This is a lesson that changed the trajectory of many of our students' lives.

And that is… you need to master your risk!

Many traders, especially when they just started out, did not understand what risk management is, and as a result, blew their capital too easily and quickly.

However, if you can master risk management, every single trade that you take, you have the full control over how much you are willing and prepared to take.

The risk isn't in the market.

The risk is in how discipline you are in managing your risk.

And here you go, the 3 hard lessons that I had to learn. But after getting through each of these, I've learned the hard way and now I'm able to enjoy my financial independence as a trader!