We’re at the half way point of this “52 Traders” journey, with last week’s guest Andrea Unger taking us to 26 traders.

If I were to add up the years of experience that we’ve all been able to tap into during these interviews I’m sure we’d be hitting somewhere near the 200 year mark. That’s 200 years of trading knowledge at your fingertips!

If you’ve just listened to the episodes once, I urge you to give them another play. You’ll be surprised at how much value you’ll take out with a second listen.

Now, if you want to take a short cut and listen to this episode, hit play below:

26 Traders, 26 Interviews, Halfway There… Time to Reflect

It’s always good to stop and reflect on progress towards a goal. My goal is to become a profitable trader and part of my journey has been interviewing successful traders on this Podcast.

I had originally planned to interview one trader per week for 52 weeks (a full year) to see what I could learn and how I could apply this to my trading to help achieve my goal. However, now I’m half way through this journey I’ve decided to reflect and change tact, somewhat, which I will explain in full at the end of this post.

3 Secrets To Becoming A Successful Trader

Since my August update I interviewed He Shuhan again, to dive a little deeper into his original comments about Volume Spread Analysis. I also met with a trader who goes by the name 50 pips, and a trio of algo/automated traders, namely Kevin Davey, Tim Rea and Andrea Unger (who are all friends, by the way, but all live in different corners of the globe and do their own thing). I also met with Peter Goodburn, an Elliott Wave specialist for the big institutions, who had one hell of a stock tip for us all! And Ryan Mallory, a stock trader from the US who took an ultra simple approach to technical analysis.

These traders are all from different backgrounds and disciplines, but as a group they echoed 3  common themes that I’ve heard throughout my 26 initial interviews. I want to touch on these themes today as they have influenced my decision making and why I have decided to change tact.

Please note, there are plenty of more themes that have come across in the interviews and I will touch on these at a later stage. For now, I just want to focus on these three:

1. It takes time, energy, commitment and dedication to become a successful trader
   As they say, “Trading isn’t get rich quick”, and this rings loud and clear throughout almost all my interviews. In actual fact, these guys have worked damn hard to get where they are and put in many hours over many years to conqure trading. And their work doesn’t stop there. They still need to concentrate, monitor and manage themselves and what they do in order to stay ahead of the ever changing market. This was best put in my interview with Barry Burns: “It’s just a lot of hard work”. On top of this, if you were to take the average length of time each of my traders took to become successful you’d find it’d work out at about 3 years. But there’s 3 years and then there’s 3 years, i.e. you can spend an hour a week over 3 years or you can spend 40 hours a week over 3 years. I’m not too sure how long my traders spent but in most cases it felt like the later.
2. You have to validate what you learn to become a successful trader
   Most of us fall into this trap ourselves. We blindly read a forum thread, download the latest free trading tool and merrily start placing trades expecting to see good results. And this is exactly what guys like Peter Davies, 50 Pips and Tim Rea did too… in the first instance. When they were sufficiently “burned” by the experience they decided to take things into their own hands and made sure they validated whatever information came their way, before applying it to their own trading. We must do the same too!
3. You have to “Master yourself” to become a successful trader
   General perception, by the majority of us, is that we find it very easy to think of trading as an abstract act of buying and selling and that we can easily detach ourselves from any emotion involved with a trade. However, the reality is very different. And this reality of controlling your emotions of fear and greed while in a trade (or even out of one) is the 3rd secret to becoming a successful trader. Nigel Hawkes and Barry Burns both talk about this in their interviews: “…master yourself” and “…they don’t master themselves”.

How I Plan to Apply These Secrets

After all these interviews, and the insights mentioned above, I’ve realized there are two major pieces of the puzzle missing from my current approach to trading:

1. I’m not putting in the time
2. I’m not in the best timezone

I feel to make a significant breakthrough I have to put more time into trading (at the moment I have very little, so something has to give) and work out how I can work with the timezone I’m in (New Zealand – so at the bottom of the world on our lonesome).

And here’s now I plan to do it:

1. I plan to take a break from the regular interviews and instead put that time into applying what I’ve learned from the first 26 interviews
2. I’ve decided that automating my trading is the best way to overcome the timezone issue – just as well I’ve found an easy way to do this and have become quite competent building automated systems 😉

So, unfortunately, it means your regular weekly interview won’t be coming next week and instead these will be more sporadic. But I promise I will hit my goal of 52 traders and most probably carry on with the interviews in some way, shape or form after that.

Why Automated Trading?

Even though many of my guests have been completely against automated trading; in the past two months I stumbled across Tim, Kevin and Andrea who are all making significant returns through automation. What’s more, Tim lives not to far from me (here in NZ) so if he can do it then at least I know it’s possible.

You Can Come On This Journey With Me!

I’ve come up with a way that you the listeners/readers can come on this journey with me (if you so wish). You’ll be able to follow my progress and make the same (or even greater) progress yourself.

I’m not going to reveal everything today, but stay tuned to the next episode or subscribe below to get notified in your inbox.

Until then, I know my last interview (the one with Andrea Unger) was a little light on content, as Andrea had written a script that I read, so if you’d like to hear more from him then he has a webinar coming up on the 3rd November where he’ll be giving you even more insight into his automated trading and how it enabled him to become the four time winner of the World Cup Trading Championship.