Article 25, Day 10. Preparation Before Forex Trading – Finding a Mentor December 14th, 2012 by Chris Pottorff | Category: BASICS Every trader needs a mentor. A sober third party with some wisdom who is qualified and experience to provide input, advice, direction or just a different point of view to an individual learning the ropes of trading. A mentor could help a trader through various phases – whether it is a return to basics or just a different way of thinking about a particular idea. I personally strongly feel that you will be a better trader if you have someone to guide you, be with you and help you on the way. It is said that once a trader stops learning, they stop trading. So even if you have a few winning hands in your kitty, few successful deals to show off, its not yet timed to show off and give a break to your learning curve. If you will analyze your winnings you will realize that it is a result of some new lesson learned and applied correctly. And for you to constantly find something new to learn about on your own is not a good possibility. You’d rather have a mentor who will teach you one good skill to the other. You do not thus waste time identifying various techniques, tools and skills. It’s someone else’s job. Your job is to get mastery over them not find them. A mentor chosen wisely will provide you with practical solutions to real trading problems. Your mentor will be there to walk you through the most common cognitive and emotional tendencies that can ruin your efforts at identifying and trading market patterns. He also shares specific skills that he has learnt over a period of time, from years of practice to help you become an effective thinker, analyzer and observer of these tendencies to be able to gain control over them. Your mentor will help you to blend state-of-the-art research based on psychology and cognitive neuroscience case studies, A mentor provides you with the basic as well as advanced (depending upon your need) intellectual and emotional support to objectively see and transform your approach to risk and reward. With your mentor’s help the first thing you will learn is that every trader is different. You are a different trader than I am or from the person who will read this post after you. Your mentor will explain to you that just like every trader are different, so is every trade. And in that lies the power of trading tools. A mentor brings a different viewpoint to each topic that he addresses for your improvement and there will almost always be a viewpoint that will be similar to your trading style and some that may be different from how you think. But they will all teach you to look at things in a different way. Mentors are also sometimes blunt. It is for the trader to not misunderstand it for being rude because the mentor doesn’t always say things that you want to hear. But trading after all is not some kid’s game and not everyone is cut out to succeed and more importantly work so hard, learning lessons all the time. A good mentor will steer you clear of the ‘Too Many Tools, Not Enough Focus’ situation. I often find some ‘once an enthusiastic trader’ lost in my mailing list. These are especially those people who started using a lot of different indicatorsfor comfort more than anything. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that and long term winning won’t ever come from looking at more indicators. It comes from experience and understanding your tools intimately. A mentor will hand hold you through the journey. A good forex trading mentor will have a look at your collection of technical tools and will help you put clarity in your case regarding things like what kind of trading should be primary focus. Are you aiming to be a trend following type of trader or a range type of trader? A mentor will help you deal with many more issues like that. A good mentor will tell his pupil to step back and figure out which style of trading is most comfortable to him. Once the trade has gained enough insight and knowledge, he can pick the tool or a set of select tools which will help him to get closer to his goals. Once the trading tools and methods are selected, it becomes a question of applying those methods and techniques over and over and over until they are understood inside out and backwards and forwards. The guys who are still learning and not yet out of frivolous excitement don’t want to go through this grind because they’re after the quick fix, and a mentor’s job is to repeatedly remind them that quick fix is not what trading success is all about especially where the reality of long-term trading success lies. Another thing a mentor teaches you is true meaning of being a professional. Professionalism in trading is about how you approach trading. It’s about treating your forex trading as if it were your profession, developing a mindset of a professional rather than that of someone doing it as a past time or just like that. If you are testing waters, I’d like to tell you that I do not consider it same as being casual. It’s more serious than that. Testing Forex waters is something absolutely critical to long-term success in the markets. Last thing when you hire a mentor is to remember that if you are not serious about trading no mentor can help. A mentor’s job is to help you understand yourself and teach you skills to understand market and have control over your mind and emotions. Likewise, no diploma is going to guarantee success in trading. Trading is a performance activity and success will come from trading, making lots of mistakes on a demo account, then live once the strategy is proven to contain an edge, reviewing and analyzing your trades so that you can identify what works and what doesn’t, making gradual improvements in results, and building confidence that can only come from proving to yourself that you can manage the risk in these uncertain markets. If there’s any guarantee of success at all, that’s where it lies. Hard work with steady improvement is what will pay in the end. Now I do not meant to say that a Diploma is not worthwhile. They are a great way to start. But make sure you do not expect them to provide some Holy Grail system that guarantees success. Everything is up to yourself. Mentors teach you. It is up to you how to use what you have learned. You can find all relevant FAQ in regards to the above article here fxkeys/preparation-before-forex-trading-finding-a-mentor/
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 07:42:39 +0000
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