Trading is a highly speculative art. It is a form of prediction that can have dire financial consequences. Often when I speak with traders, they have the mindset that the market is an enemy, which takes away their profits. Their enemy is their own. There is no enemy. The market is effusive, organic, and represents a paradigm shift; a vast ocean that pushes and pulls and gradually will drown you unless you learn to float on water, and learn to move to the rhythms of the oceans waves.
Struggling against the market is akin to trying to swim against the current. The ocean is more powerful than you are. When I first learned to surf, I fell many times, but after much practice, I realised that there was a method to the madness.
Intraday traders often have great technical skills akin to coding. They play poker when the market slows down, they place and cancel orders, learn to read the tape, and play against automated programmes from the financial instutitions that have utilised scalping technologies without a human interface.
Swing and position traders, like myself, can't be replaced by automatons, at least not yet, at this particular juncture in time in 2011. We have a thinking skill that cannot be replicated by software programmes. This ability for analysis is the same as if one were analysing a work of literature. The market possesses a plotline, a summary, a list of characters of various players, and shifts and movements that we recognise and place our bets on.
When I first started trading, I was at first, lured by the power of shifting large amounts of capital around, but as I grew more familiar with the market, I realised that it was really a kind of blueprint of humanity; in each movement, possessed truths about our society. The market was really a macrocosm of each individual action, in which a combination of fundamental analysis along with a technical understanding of its recurring motifs are necessary in the highly speculative art of being a trader.
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