This is a Guest Post by Dante Vincent you can find him on Twitter @DGTrading101. This post originally appeared on his website dgtrading101.blogspot.com. It is reposted here with permission.
I get approached with this question so often. “How do I find direction in my trading? I don’t have a niche. I feel like everybody has one and I don’t. And I don’t even know where to start. Help – I don’t know what to do.”
So, here is what I say to you. For starters, you aren’t alone. NOBODY knew what to do at the start of their journey. Nobody. And that’s completely normal, you’re not supposed to. Like I said in a tweet the other day:
‘Trading is not going from Point A to Point B. More like a drunken zig zag stumble from Point A to Point Z”
……….and making pit stops at the rest of the alphabet and entire numerical system as we know it on the way there.
You find out what TO do through a process of trial & error and realizing what NOT to do.
That’s what the journey is. Its very simple. Wake up – try something. See what happens. If it doesn’t work? That’s fine. MOST things you try…will not work. Are they failures? Absolutely not. What they are – are the next puzzle pieces to the completed masterpiece that is your successful trading career. What I mean by that is say you try something for a day or a week, and you fail. Well, now you still don’t know what to do. But guess what? The next day, you certainly know what NOT to do – which is that last thing you tried that clearly wasn’t working.
Say there are 100 possible mistakes to make at the very beginning of your journey, last week you woke up and you didn’t know any of them. Then you tried something that doesn’t work. Next week you wake up, now there are only 99 possible mistakes to make. So even though you still don’t know what to do – you’re a little bit closer. And it’s a process of elimination of unsuccessful experiments that leads you to where you want to go. DON’T try and mimic Trader XYZ because you saw him post a big PnL. Or “Oh this accredited guy does this so I have to do it that way” – no. Try everything. See how YOU feel. Don’t let others successes dictate what you trade. YOU need to dictate what you trade.
I saw a guy post a million dollar options trade on $AAPL a few weeks ago. Pretty sweet. Does that mean I’m going to stop what I’m doing, go open an Options Flux account and try to trade options now? Hell no!
Process that. Because it’s the answer to your problems. The answer is not in your local chatroom, or in a DVD, or in a 140 character tweet somewhere, or in someone else’s successes, it’s right there. The sooner you realize it’s on YOU to find the solutions, and that nobody is going to hand them to you – is the day your path to profitability starts.
You are the only one inside your own head. You are the only one who knows how you feel. All the big successful traders you know have a certain style & type of trading they like to do, and it’s not random. It’s what THEY are comfortable with and understand best. Not what YOU are comfortable with and understand best. Meddling in things you don’t fully understand because you are led to believe there is a pot of gold at the end is one of the most dangerous things you could possibly do.
Don’t follow another’s path. Blaze your own trail. That is where true confidence and all things trading success begins.
For more by Dante Vincent you can find him on Twitter @DGTrading101 or his website at dgtrading101.blogspot.com.
