What Kind of Person You Need to Become to Be Profitable

17 Nov 2022

Hello traders,

All the below are based on my preferences, I don't give any financial recommendations and I have nothing to sell you with this article.
I'm sharing content because I see a lot of traders being/becoming broke and I don't want you to be one of them.

Why have I been sharing so many articles so far?

I’ve shared one educational post a day because being a trader is a job.
And a job is the sum of many skills to acquire.

Each skill taken individually won’t make you a profitable trader.

Talking about me and the guys from my trading community, only all those skills applied altogether give us a shot at making money.

Trading is one of the most challenging and one of the most monetary rewarding activity.

Work on yourself first



Your trading profitability is a direct reflection of who you are as an individual.


It’s just is.

If you’re not profitable, it’s because you made some mistakes.

And if you made them, it’s because you didn’t work enough on yourself yet.


Having great trading signals is indeed an essential tool among the stack of tools to have but… this is not enough.


And I’m saying this as someone selling trading signals (and a trading course).



In a past life, when I worked as a back office Quant, we were strongly encouraged to workout, meditate, eat healthy, sleep 7+ hours, having some social life, etc…

Being a trader is first being a human with great habits leading him/her towards nothing else but excellence.

How can someone expects to perform well at such a tough job while being fat and/or sleeping 4 hours a night and/or not controlling his mind/emotions,…



YOU JUST CAN’T.

Trading is hard enough already and the market knows damn well how to take the hard-earned money from people who didn’t work on themselves enough.

Your skills stack

As an entrepreneur owning online businesses, I had to learn about sales, marketing, negotiation, copywriting, accounting, taxes optimisation, coding, hiring, building a company culture, …



Each skill taken separately isn’t enough to bootstrap a business.



All of them used together gave me a shot at succeeding


The same goes with trading.

The reason any very profitable trader I know became profitable after some serious time is because the stack of skills to acquire is consequential.

And I’m not talking about skills we can learn in a short timeframe.

I had to learn how to: (non-exhaustive list)

- Meditate
- Refrain myself from trading when I’m tired or sick or frustrated
- Put my ego side and time to time get back to trading with smaller position size
- Take my profit for the day and get out of my place and go outside
- Eat/sleep properly
- Relax and breath and do some NSDR (Non-Sleep Deep Rest)
- Working out properly and building muscles -> I’m so sure there is a direct correlation for men between our Testosterone level and the courage to enter and manage difficult trades.
- Not be greedy -> One needs to get slapped hard in the face a few times to understand that
- Never anticipate -> many times I cut a trade before the stop-loss or I entered too early front-running some signal(s) - in retrospect, was really a stupid behaviour
- Psychology and Game Theory
- Code trading scripts and trading bots in multiple programming languages
- Listen to the right mentors aka traders way ahead of me in term of net worth
- …

Those skills used altogether compound and made me a very disciplined person - those are my daily non-negotiable behaviours.

If you’re not profitable yet, it isn’t necessarily because the signals you have are bad.

And to figure out if they’re bad or not, you need some trading experience… which comes from….. taking a huge amount of trades for an extended period of time.

Your lack of profitability, comes for most of you from some work you still need to do.



And by the way, each trade you take works on you.

Your trades work on you more than you work on them.



What I mean by that, the more trades you take, the more skilled you get as you keep learning about yourself.

A virtuous feedback loop.

Many traders who lost everything due to a big mistake knew how to make it all back and beyond because…. they already had the required skills.

Conclusion



A red-pilled trader could decide to put his/her money into a 100% trading bot because… learning all those skills is time-consuming.



My advice to that person is…. “Good luck with your endeavour, you’ll likely wreck yourself”

If you don’t trust me… well… I worked as a back office Quant coding trading bots for about 5 years in NYC.

I tested and built more bots than 99.99% of people.

Retail trading bots sellers are selling a concept, a dream which by definition doesn’t reflect the reality.

Regardless of the strategy, it’s unlikely a 100% automated bot performs well overtime as market conditions keep changing.



We’re now in uncharted territory with a very high inflation rate, extreme tensions between countries, an extreme defiance of people of their governments, the WEF, WHO, … (and how could we not blame them seeing what they did to us those past 2 years)

Anyway, what I’m strongly recommending as someone who built non-retail trading bots for a living: learn to trade manually first and then learn how to pilot a bot.


Quotes of the day

- “Never chase opportunities. Let it come to you by creating value and building rare skillsets.” ― Johannes Larsson

- “The ability to make wise choices is the most valuable skill a person can develop.” ― Abhishek Ratna

“Skills don’t die; only people do.” ― Anas Hamshari

“A good trader converts his skills to cash.” ― Michael Bassey Johnson


I'll keep bringing a few articles like this every week because it helps me clarifying my thoughts AND giving back to the community makes me feel good about myself somehow :)

Thank you for reading
Dave