Trader Meetups (Part 5)

Parts 2 and 3 of this series included thoughts and experiences of an advanced option student on the road to full-time trading.  I was somewhat appalled in reading them and you can see my response here.

I went on to cite Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and the “10,000-hour rule.”  This is consistent with my experience of working 50-60 hours per week over the first four years.

Trading for a living requires a tireless devotion toward learning the craft.  One does not become a pharmacist, a physician, or a lawyer overnight.  Any professional discipline requires years of study.  Human greed makes it difficult to ignore the plethora of advertisements offering fool’s gold like “great money investing that takes just a couple hours per week.”  This is optionScam.com.  It’s not going to happen.  It’s not reality.  If you fall for the sales pitch then you can expect to lose money in the pursuit each and every time.

Learning how to trade is easily stated and hard to do.  Follow the suggestions given here.  Do hundreds of backtested and paper trades.  Execute tens upon hundreds of small, live trades.  Monitor these trades.  Analyze them.  Think hard about how they are working and what leads to different outcomes.  Think about generalities and apply tenets of System Development as I have discussed in numerous blog posts.  When you see something, is it curve-fit and specific to that trade or is it robust and applicable to different types of environments?

Do all this and you will have your hands full.  I can guarantee that you won’t be thinking about other things to occupy your time or about how to be perceived as busy (absurdly suggested here).  Your brain will hurt many times over from analyzing and studying everything there is to know and putting yourself in a good position to succeed over the long-term.

Tomorrow I will return to the beginning.