Live To Trade Another Day

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I have read the following books:

- How to Make Money in Stocks - A winning system in good times or Bad by J O'Neil - Read it twice - This is definitely not a bad book

- Smart Investors - Keep it Simple- by Rigters - It was a nice beginning book for sure (Suited me very well)

- Top 10 Trading Setups - It goes into details a bit more, you have to filter our the noise in that book, but great for sure.

- The intelligent Investor - By Ben Graham - This one is really great. Very nice all around, not for a day trader exactly, invaluable information (on of my favorite)

- I read Day Trading - Nice little book - for day traders this definitely works.

 

I was excited after reading Andrew's book and joining the class, so I went on and bought more books and got more interested. I was eager to get started, but something happened, there was a bit of information overload for me (I was reading and subscribing to a lot of online forums and what not - it was too much, too much information, too much noise in the market and too many institutions trying to sell their products and convince you they have the best systems. If you work hard at this, you'll be your own best system so pace yourself and filter out the noise). My nature is that I like to see what I am doing, I learn from experience better than anything else, so a couple of these books, I had to re-read, like the first one, in order to make better sense of them and make better use of the techniques after I went live with IB.

 

Also, the market is like a living organism, so it just takes a bit of time to adjust oneself, to fail, to try different things and to also be patient and to actually really understand what one is trying to accomplish. I remember Andrew used to say: "keep your portions low, focus on learning"; but at the beginning I was not doing that - which is a big mistake because you will lose trades, it takes time to build the needed discipline to learn and keep your wallet. So keep your loses low, always keep them low(your entries low and follow your stop loses to the letter) so that you can survive the grueling learning curve.

 

The students also have to want to go for it. I didn't stop with just the classes, I still do and will continue to do a lot of research at nights, look at tons of charts, learn patterns one at a time and find where you can apply them and also see them in real time and completely try different strategies completely out of the norm (this is a process, so it takes time as well). Every individual is different and I needed to find my style, approach and what works best for me and continuously adjust it to fit; I think that's going to be the case for a very long time.

 

Then also comes funding your account, it has to be money that you can afford to put there and forget about or if you were to lose it, you'd be ok and you don't rely on it. I think the added pressure of knowing you're using money you can't afford to lose would not benefit a trader at all and make things worse when you lose some of it, which is almost inevitable. It's unfortunate that money is the tool being used here, but in your mind and especially at the beginning, this should have not anything to do with money exactly. I know it sounds weird and that's why you cannot have your heart tied to these funds. It's like working on a big, lengthy project, some things will work and some won't, but if you look at this as a long term affair, then you can better pace yourself and learn better (live to trade another day).