How to Keep Moving Forward as a Trader
Even if you lose money.
Trading is unique in that you can undo years of progress in minutes. The difference with normal business isn’t that you can’t endure a large loss in a short period of time – a regular company can face existential lawsuits or revolutionary technology that undermines their business. The difference is that in normal business, one is continuously building something other than money. One is building a product or service, such as software or a machine, which continuously improves. It is possible to, every day, point to what concrete improvement was made to the product/service, regardless of how the money is doing. However, in trading, especially discretionary trading where one isn’t building an algorithm or infrastructure, the only thing that is continuously accumulating is the money. The money, then, is the product… or is it?
No, you are the product.
You are continuously building yourself and making yourself better. The trading record is a metric of how good you get, but remember that you are the fundamental product being bettered. What’s tricky is that, with software you can see more features getting added and new webpages etc., while most of the growth as a human trader isn’t visible. But it is still there.
You don’t make the mistakes you used to make. That’s one of the keys. You may have new ideas or be willing to trade certain situations you were previously averse to. There are still some analogies with other business, such as running a restaurant. In the end the restaurant could go out of business, and there may not be much left to show for it, except for you and the skills you developed. In many ways this is what life is anyways. At the end of life it all gets taken away. Maybe the whole idea of moving forward, specifically the notion of continuously accumulating something concrete and visible, might not be as important as it seems.
Trading isn’t so clear and measurable, the path forward isn’t always clear, but that’s the whole point. That is life. The path forward isn’t always clear, and whether or not you’re doing well isn’t always so measurable. This is one of the reasons it’s hard for ais to replicate it. Success is hard to measure. In life, you just go out and do stuff. You don’t know ahead of time if things will work out, if you’re doing the right thing, and you have no real way of even measuring that, but you do it anyway and you do your best.