Hardwired to Trade

You will find that as you learn how to trade, it is not enough to be told something, read about it, and then experience it in the market. Taken cumulatively as an approach to learning, that still amounts to a series of brief impressions. To have a method or a trading plan truly hardwired into your head takes many, many impressions or, ideally, many months or even years of demo or live trading. Gaining that experience takes discipline.

It’s not enough to say that you believe in a method or in yourself; you have to know it subconsciously, and that takes repetition, which takes time. Regardless of how much you read or are told about the way a trading method or indicator works, in our experience you probably will make mistakes in execution. This happens for many reasons, most of which have very little to do with the market and much to do with your internal beliefs and experience. The saying “the map is not the territory” makes sense from a trading perspective. By this we mean that you can study the map beforehand all you want, but once you are sitting by the screen alone in your trading room considering markets and potential trade setups, it is a completely different experience, making your behavior less predictable.

We once had an acquaintance say to us that he knew he needed to understand the method but that he was looking forward to acquiring the “intuition” of a successful trader as soon as he could. We caution against this type of approach because student traders should not even consider the idea that intuition can play a part in trading until they have the mechanics of a method down cold, meaning hundreds if not thousands of demo and live trades logged. Intuition does not come from thinking or studying; it comes from experience, which costs time. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk, and in trading that means that hope quickly gives way to frustration and fear; if you can get past that, you may find yourself standing at the crossroads of quitting and eventual success. It is from there that your journey will begin. We know it is hard for clients to hear this because it is not what they want to hear.

People have a habit of not remembering and recording things they do not want to hear.