Depending on the way that you trade it could be considered a lot like hunting, here are a lot of similarities around the two. When hunting your prey is an animal, but with trading, it is a completely different type of beast, it’s the markets. We can take a lot of the skills required to be a good hunter and adapt them to be used with trading which could potentially help bring you in some successful trading. So let’s have a look at what sort of skills and traits could carry over from hunting to trading.
Understanding Your Prey
When hunting, you need to get a good understanding of the prey that you are going for, the way it behaves, the way it may react to certain things, and also how it moves. The markets are very similar, each market and currency pair will behave in a completely different way and different things will cause them to act in different ways. Getting a good understanding of the one you are looking at is vital for analysis purposes and also to know about where to place your stop losses and take profits. So before placing a trade, get to know what influences the market that you are looking at and which economic reports or news events may cause it to run in a certain direction.
Create a Plan
When hunting, you aren’t just going to charge straight in with your gun or knife and fire at the prey. You will instead come up with a plan, a way to lure the beast, or a way to hide and wait. The markets are very similar, you cannot just jump in with both feet and begin placing trades. You need to create a plan, how you will trade, how you will analyse the markets, and how you will protect the account should the trade get away from you.
Wait for an Opportunity
Hunting can require a lot of patience, as you cannot just charge in or fire at something that isn’t there yet, you must be able to wait until the opportunity comes. Trading is very similar, there won’t always be opportunities to trade, there will be times when the markets are very quiet, in these situations you need to be able to display some patience, wait for the conditions to change into your favor and then when they do, it will give you the opportunity to strike.
Monitor the Situation
Things do not always go exactly to plan, maybe your trap didn’t catch it, or your first shot missed, this is the time where you will need to adapt in order to get the kill. It is very similar to trading, the markets won’t always move the way that you expect them to and things may need to be changed. Hopefully, your trading plan has a contingency in it and tells you what to do if something doesn’t go right or if things change. Maybe you need to let the trade or prey go, or maybe you need to adapt and go at it another way. It is exactly the same with trading, constantly analyse the markets, and adapt your trade to suit the markets, don’t try to force the original trade that you had planned.
Learn from Mistakes
You do not start hunting as a master hunter, in fact, your first few hunts you probably won’t come back with anything, this is the same with trading, you will make mistakes, there is no doubt about that and you will make some initial losses at the start. When a mistake is made, then learn from it, use it as a learning experience, maybe certain lore didn’t work or maybe your entry wasn’t quite right, so learn from them and adapt it for the future. This also goes for things that work, if something went well, write it down and remember it, it could make the hunt or trade a lot easier in the future as it will most likely work again.
So those are a few little things that are similar between a hunter and a trader, it is all about planning, execution and then adapting to changes, the markets will always be changing, so having those traits in your arsenal will help you to adapt with them and to remain profitable.
