A thread on learning trading:

When you come to trading you aren’t a blank canvas. You have views about how the world works or should work.

You typically take the same views & philosophies into trading.

This is often where it starts to go wrong.

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In the world you were brought up in and in your education and development you swallowed beliefs, often unwittingly about how to succeed in that world.

One belief drummed into us from an early age is that the world is ‘deterministic’. A + B will lead to C.

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This also means you can solve for solutions. If you know C and B, you can find out what A is.

We thus believe that there are formulas and laws and that if we learn them we will find the answers and succeed in the challenges we face.

We work hard, go to college, learn.

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In many jobs we go into we live by these beliefs - with a few exceptions.

(Certain professions learn these don’t work in reality: I tend to meet quite a lot of people from these professions who seem to succeed in trading. - Engineers, Sportspeople, Artists, Poker players).

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Trading doesn’t take place in a ‘Deterministic’ world. You can’t learn to trade like you can learn to build a shed, become a plumber, a mechanic, an accountant.

In trading A + B doesn’t = C. Or at least it might today, & the next day, but not necessarily the day after.

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Having an incompatible philosophical approach to trading will likely doom you to struggle.

Trading occurs against a backdrop of randomness & uncertainty.

You can win & yet it’s due to luck, or lose having done everything right.

Our mind struggles with these concepts.

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Matters of learning to trade are then compounded when we do start trading.

Often the first things you learn in trading are not necessarily suitable or appropriate for ‘you’.

But we are typically unlikely to question these first learnings & very likely to accept them.

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In the new Unknown Market Wizards book that features interviews with 11 highly successful traders, you’ll read that they all do the job differently.

There’s so many different ways to trade, and finding the one that suits you is vital.

A point Jack Schwager makes
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repeatedly in the book, is that your style & your personality have to match. The edge you need to succeed in trading is threadbare thin at the best of times. If your style & personality don’t match, then your ability to have an edge & execute it are severely compromised.

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To return to learning to first trade. It’s highly unlikely (but not impossible) that the 1st person you learn from, or those that wrote the 1st books you read or courses you attended will match your personality.

It takes time to find & settle upon a style that suits you,

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perhaps in many cases it take years.

So to repeat the main points:

1) Our mindset & worldview is almost certainly inappropriate for trading success. We aren’t probabilistic thinkers but are caught with a philosophy based around deterministic thinking.

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2) Trading is not a ‘How to’ activity. It’s a performance activity, you have to learn the skills, and make your understanding of the job second nature (unconscious). This can take many years.

3) We need to have a style which matches our personality. It’s unlikely the style 12/14

that you 1st learned, practiced & believed unquestionably was the right path for you. It can take years to get to the right one (if ever).

These are huge impediments to early success. Yet most people rush into trading as if it’s something

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they will succeed at almost overnight.

Many people remain stuck on the wrong path for years, which is why they continue to struggle, and so often fail.

Perhaps that’s why the tweet pinned to my profile resonates with so many.

As a reminder it’s here
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