Navigating the Market: My Odyssey Through Trading
Lessons from the Unforeseen Value of Failure
Section 1: Sparking an Interest in Trading
I remember when I first started trying to trade, everything was about making money as fast and easy as possible. You’d see all of these big numbers from others, supposedly successful traders online, and even if I didn’t believe them—I think I was always skeptical—I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t say it didn’t spark my interest.
I’d go and try to learn all of their systems and understand the reasons for taking positions, hoping it would work for me too. Often, these characters were always anonymous people on peculiar forums talking about hypothetical performances from questionable sources. But back then, you never knew. I was trying to find something that I was good at, and I didn’t care that much about the validity of what these people were trying to sell. I just wanted to make it myself.
Section 2: The Essence of Skepticism and Exploration
This was an essential part of my growth in this business. Being able to look skeptically at an idea, and still going ahead to test it. Many people dismiss ideas because they think they’re above them, or for some other reason. I do believe that spending time working through an idea and testing its validity is crucial, especially when we're starting out, to get a better grasp of what can work and what doesn’t. We need to develop our intuition of why ideas work or don’t work in the market. The best way I know to do that is by actually working on those ideas.
Section 3: The Lure of Trading
I started looking at forex markets back in 2017. I didn’t give it proper attention at the time; I was just eyeing which online "business" I could make money on, and trading naturally was one of the first pop-ups when you research these types of questions. The fact that trading pops up so much online should have been a red flag if I had asked myself the right questions, such as:
If someone is making money in a business, and if we assume that the opportunity is finite, why is it in their interest to advertise to competitors what they do?
These questions, emanating from a skeptical mind, are vital at an early stage in every business. If some inefficiency is widely available, it no longer is one. Usually, opportunity gaps in the market have a finite capacity, and if everyone is doing the same thing, that business no longer exists.
Consider a fruit store in a local village market where the population is 1000 people. If that business is widely profitable because it’s the only one in town, how many stores will it take to dilute that store’s earnings? That is a question about the capacity of a market inefficiency.
Section 4: Nurturing Naivety and Self-Growth
Getting back to where I started, I never asked those sorts of questions. So, I was naturally led into the path of testing widely available systems and indicators to try and find some approach that would make me money every week and month. In hindsight, everything looks dumb, but I was only around 19 years old at the time when I first started looking, so I give myself a discount for my naivety. I had to start somewhere, right?
But that led me down the road of testing ideas on simple Excel sheets and forced me to learn statistical analysis and Excel skills that I didn’t have prior to that experience. It eventually led me down the path of having to learn to code, which has been a massive improvement in every area of my professional life. So, it definitely wasn’t wasted time looking at all of these ideas.
Section 5: Learning by Doing and Participating
I truly believe that the best way to learn is by doing and participating in the game. You will never understand why something doesn’t work just by someone telling you or you reading it. You need to be in the game and understand the practical application of what you’re trying to achieve. As time goes on, you will get an intuition that you didn’t have prior to that practical application of your ideas. It’s all great in theory, but once you have to go into the "battlefield," it all changes.
Back then, I was too focused on trying to follow rules, whilst the problem, even though it requires a set of rules to be followed, was not solved by mere rules. The problem of markets is solved by understanding your role in the market as a participant and what you’re aiding the market to do.
As Mike Tyson famously said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”