The mental side to trading

There's a fundamental side to trading that you can pick up within 6 months, if you dedicate enough time to it. You can learn technical analysis and you can learn charting.

What takes a lot longer to master is yourself, and I'm no expert in that field yet.

I'm a lot more emotionless with trading than the majority, owing to my experience with it, but that's not to say I'm the finished article by a long stretch.

In any new discipline with life, you get into it and you pick the low hanging fruits first. The easy wins.

As such, most people believe that their progression from terrible to amazing is a smooth, linear process. I'll highlight this in an ultra professional graph below:

This is even more true in crypto, where at one point in time you could throw money blindfolded at anything and make ridiculous profits. This linear progression seemed the norm.

Nobody ever in the history of the world has achieved greatness in that sort of progression. My friend and I back in our forex days devised the below graph, which is more representative of the mental battles we have in trading.

It's important to note that as you progress, your lows are always higher than the previous lows, given that you have more experience and knowledge - unless of course you're not learning from your lessons! :-)

The trajectory is a slow one, and usually 2 steps forward and 1 step back.

I look at this chart when I'm experiencing a low, to remind myself that all is not lost. Trading can be a really tough one, and you need some perspective on where things stand.

I'm currently clawing my way out of a "I am worthless" phase, after having a great first month trading, and then a terrible past 4 weeks where I was doing stupid emotional FOMO trading.

But, I've learned a lot and stand myself in good stead going forward.

As long as you don't keep making the same mistakes, you will continue your move forward.