For many, the idea of trading is about just one thing, the money, it can help to make us financially free, it can help us to pay our bills and for some, they hope that it can make them rich. Of course, this is all true, there is a lot of money available to be made with trading, but have you ever thought about the other things that it gets you? There is far more to trading and it can offer you a lot more than just the money.
There is one thing that everyone will agree with when it comes to trading, this is that it is hard to be consistently profitable, so if it is so hard to make money, why do so many people do it? The truth is that there are other benefits to it too, there are a lot of psychological benefits to trading that we will look at. So let’s take a look at what some of the other benefits are that you can get from trading.
The first skill that trading can teach you is patience, this is a virtue that will benefit you in pretty much everything that you do in life. Patience allows you to get through those boring stages in life, this is taught to us during our trading life as our trading plans have very specific requirements for each trade, when they aren’t being met, we need to wait, we need to be able to wait for the correct setups as trading without them is what we know as a bad trade. This patience that we build up allows us to do many other things in life without the usual irritation that we would have otherwise had, waiting in line at the post office or waiting for a bus to arrive, it will make these experiences a lot more bearable for you.
Trading can also teach us about dedication and determination, it can take a long time to become profitable and so we need to be able to keep at it, to keep learning and developing ourselves as traders. This can teach us ways that we can do this with things that aren’t to do with trading also, things like getting fit, one of the things that people struggle with the most when it comes to getting healthy is being able to stick with it, having the determination to stay with it and to keep on pushing until they reach their goals.
This leads us into self-motivation, you will most likely be trading alone and by yourself, so it is vital that you develop and learn how to self-motivate yourself. This is you telling yourself about why you are getting up each day to trade. This is particularly powerful when things are not currently going the right way. When things are wrong and things are hard, it takes a lot of strength to motivate yourself to work and to continue working. This can then be used in the world outside of trading too, motivating yourself to work or to achieve something that you have always wanted to do, self-motivation is incredibly powerful and is a fantastic tool to have in your arsenal.
The final skill or virtue that we will be looking at is your risk tolerance, you often see people come into trading hating risk, not wanting anything to do with it, ell if they want to become a successful trader they are going to need to develop a slightly more tolerant stance on risk. Trading is all about risk, so the more you do it, the more used to taking that risk you will be, this can then be taken into the world. Maybe you will now take part in more dangerous activities that you would otherwise have said no to and avoided. Being more tolerant of risk can open up a lot of very exciting does for you.
So those are some of the skills that you can make from trading and use in your everyday life, some will be easier to develop than others, but what is important is that you are able to transfer the skills.
