Have you attended 2 - 5 day trading courses and at the end of these courses feel so hyped up and motivated to start trading? It seems to simple and easy to trade during your training, but the moment you reach home and want to start trading on your own, it becomes so different from what you've been taught during the seminars.
For example, the trend lines that you see during class are so simple and clear, but on your own the charts seem like a confusing mass of ups and downs. There are so many possible trend lines that can be drawn, and they conflict with each other.
You can draw UP trends, yet at the same time you can also draw DOWN trends.
So which takes precedence? The uptrend or the downtrend?
Examples Shown In Trading Courses and Seminars
Charts and trades that are shown to you during your trading class are always made simple, clear and straightforward. The reason why is that these charts are usually cherry-picked to show you "perfect" trade examples, so that you can visually capture what your trade should look like. And with these type of lessons, the entries, stops and profit targets are almost always "spot on".
However, as a trading course attendee, you must realize that these trade examples are done up to show what is the best case scenario. Over a period of time, as you constantly look and study such trades, your ability to pick up the beginnings of such a trade improve. The problem is when novice traders expect the first few charts they pull up to look like the ones they see in class.
It's a case of unrealistic expectations meeting trading reality.
After Attending Trading Courses
The truth is that after a trading course, it will take awhile for the novice trader to sift through the information shared in the trading courses. And in reality, actual trading requires a trader to make many decisions that are outside the course materials. Charts are hardly ever perfect, and it usually comes down to being able to weigh the factors against each other before taking a trade. This is where experience analyzing and reviewing hundreds of charts come in.
The trader just coming home from these courses and seminars are usually in for a rude awakening when they find out the charts aren't as perfect as the ones they see in class. Analyzing a single chart alone could take hours for a new trader, not to mention 5 - 10 charts. The good news is that it gets easier and easier, until reading chart patterns becomes a sub-conscious skill that you execute as naturally as speaking in your native language.
Does this mean you have been "cheated" by the trading courses and seminars that you attended?
Trading courses are designed they way they are because the basics are required before moving into advanced trading techniques and skills. This doesn't mean you can't be a successful trader based on what you learnt in the course alone, but it's a rare case where a novice trader can become a consistently successful trader overnight.
Besides, consistently successful means over weeks, months and years!
Classrooms and The Live Forex Trading Environment
Classrooms and the actual trading experience are two very different animals, as any trader who's been around for some time can share with you. It will take a completely new trader some time to assimilate and wrap their mind around the basic trading concepts. It's only once they understand these basic concepts, the actual phase of applying these concepts into trading comes into play.
You can't apply something you don't know.
Another point to note is that during Forex Trading Courses and Seminars, the results you see in an instant are taken over a period of weeks, months, sometimes even years. To find a single good trade, you may have to go through 5, 10 maybe even 20 charts sometimes!
What you see in a a few minutes shown on a screen is a very different experience from the actual daily work of trading, where you review market action, analyze charts and then make trading decisions. This causes inner conflict when initial expectations clash with the actual work you have to put in on a regular basis.
Trading is "work", you know. ;-)
Having A Trading Mentor
If you're really serious about trading and you're finding it difficult to fully see the flow of the markets, it might be a good idea for you to find a trading mentor who can share with you the finer points of trading.
Everybody has access to trading basics, but yet the success rate remains so low. You really just need to walk into a bookstore and pick up a technical analysis book off the shelf. Of course, attending a trading course helps to make the study of such dry materials a lot easier and simpler, where you can ask questions and the educator use different examples to illustrate the same concept in many ways.
Forex Trading Success comes over time, practice and small steady improvements.
Have you ever heard of this commonly shared saying?
"A Good Trader can make money with a mediocre system,
But a Mediocre Trader will lose money Even with a good system."
It takes time and practice to be a good trader. And it takes a varied set of skills and a trader's temperament to become successful at this game of making money from money. Having a trading mentor helps to ease you through the teething phase where you are just learning what it takes to be a good forex trader. It doesn't mean you'll be a success over night, but given enough time and practice, you will be.
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