DISCLAIMER: While it is very possible that you could replace your current income by focusing on what is discussed in this article, you probably shouldn't quit your job until you have 2-3 years of consistent profitability under your belt. Trading is an emotional game, and the game changes drastically when you rely on those trades to end in profit in order for you to eat, pay rent, or buy baby formula.
Over 90% of retail traders fail, and as we have outlined in previous articles, this is mostly due to the psychological and emotional hindrances new traders burden themselves with - they get in their own way. In the market, you are your most formidable adversary, and most people do not fully understand how to overcome the only obstacle that matters for success; it isn't the market, but yourself.
So, what needs to happen, or what skills do you need to learn, in order to “Quit Your Job in 90 Days”? The first is an incredibly simple fix that most people are too lazy to do. People see trading as gambling or pushing buttons on a phone or computer, and the number on the screen next to “account balance” either goes up or down after the conclusion of the trade. But often, they don’t fully understand why the end result has occurred.
Step 1: Journal Your Trades
For you to find success, you have to analyze what went wrong or more importantly what went right on any given trade. Did you make a mistake somewhere regardless of win or lose? Did you execute flawlessly? Did you do everything right and still get stopped out? These are questions you need to be able to answer in order to improve your thought process for the next trade to come. Traders will enter the market in the morning, make or lose money, and then move on and never look at that chart ever again. This is completely unacceptable and you will never have success this way because of one key concept discussed in the past: traders will operate under the misconception that they are following their strategy to a T but in reality, they are fumbling around and messing it up completely. How will you truly know what you need to improve unless you go back and let your trades tell you?
Step 2: Backtesting and Practice
After you have a preliminary idea of where your errors are coming from, now comes the most crucial part of trading, backtesting with the replay function on TradingView or any other service that allows you to go back in time and replay price action. At this point, you have an idea of where your skills are lacking and can now enter a risk-free market environment to hone those skills and improve on them. Not only does this give you more practice, but it removes the emotional element of fear of losing money and allows you to build muscle memory of entering trade setups that make complete sense. On any given trading day you may take 1-3 trades, in one afternoon with the replay and backtesting function you can take hundreds of trades. The amount of data and repetition you receive from this is priceless.
Many of you have entered the market over the last few years and just don't have the experience of seeing how these charts move after years of staring at price action. For example, I have been studying markets since I was 14 years old (I am 24 now), there are many things that I am able to pick up on in the marketplace because I have seen it play out hundreds of times. Does this make me smarter than any of you? Absolutely not. I have just put in the time over the years that gives me this experience and am able to relay that information to you in real time.
After 90 days of completing step one and two as outlined above, you should see a drastic performance shift in your trading. For those of you still on the fence about putting in this amount of time to practice, I want to end by asking you a question, Do you think your performance in the market would be better or worse if you saw your trade setup 1 time or have sat down and seen it play out over 10,000 times? You all know the correct answer but it is up to you to take action, put in the work, and join the rest of us in what I like to call “Print City”.