Consistent Profitability, how long does it take?

20 Jun 2022

How long does it take to become consistently profitable as a trader? This is one of the most searched questions in the Internet when it comes to trading and the beauty is there's no right answer. When you do receive an answer, it's miss leading to beginners and everyone gets confused. There's a solid chance that you've looked at this before, or perhaps you just seen the title of this post and clicked on it. How long this is going to take you to master the arts of the market. There's a good chance you sat there and questioned, "what am I doing? how long are we going for? What should I be goal setting in terms of time with trading?" if you see yourself in this position or you've seen it previously, I finally have the answer you need to hear.

How long does it take you to become consistent and profitable trading?
As long as it takes.

There's so many different sources which claim so many different time limits that it takes to master Forex trading or crypto trading or industry, trade, whatever it might be your embarking on. All of them say the same around two to three years to become a consistent and experienced professional. Yet, where are they getting this data from? I know traders that master trading within six months. I also know other traders that traded for six years and couldn't get the look of it. There's no time frame to put on trading in terms of success and consistency. It isn't a university course, we don't sit down and do all the course procedures and even if we do, the bare minimum, still graduate in three years. That's not how trading works.

The question you should be asking isn't how long is this going to take me to master, but rather how many hours are you going to put into it. Day in, day out, how much work are you going to do? That is what will determine how long it takes you to become successful in this industry. There's so many people that will see 2 and a half years to become successful trader, then they trade half heartedly as if it is a hobby. They don't concentrate too much. They just trade here in there. Two and a half years pass and they'll call themselves seasoned professionals because they have been in the market for 2 1/2 years. Yet they couldn't show a single piece of consistency within their trading. Then there's other traders that put in hard work. I'm talking 8 hours a day of pure grueling backtesting, trade management, risk management, analyzing everything, and they put an exponential amount of work in and in six months they can outperform anyone else who's ever step foot in the market.

Time is not an important factor. The amount of work you are putting in is the important factor. Yes, time will tell whether or not you can be successful in this industry, but if you're measuring time based off of when you've been interested or when you've been trading a little bit and rather than the actual hard, grueling hours that you're putting into trading. Then you will never get to that level you want to get too. You have to put in the hard yards.

This industry is very advertised as easy, simple and the money making machine. There's a number of different factors in which we can blame for that, but we're not going to dive into that today. What I want to share with you is this is not easy. This is actually one of the hardest professions you could ever do, because work doesn't just stop, we don't just clock off and get paid the same amount every week. It's all dependent on the amount of time and effort you put into the market.
Do you want to be profitable and consistent in trading? Then put in the hard work. Stop Googling how long it's going to take. Stop having a look at other people's success stories. Knuckle down and put in the hard work. Then in two years, three years, six years, 10 years, whatever it's going to take. Look back and be proud. When someone asks you how long did it take you? Don't answer about six years or two years, be honest. How many hours did you have to invest? How hard was the work?