Trading is a huge industry and there are thousands of different ways to get involved and ways to actually trade. It is a never-ending educational process and it has a never-ending learning curve. It takes a lot of dedication and practice, however, it is something that you need to be able to develop your own style and your own way of learning.
“But Bob has a good system, I can use that one!” You can indeed use that strategy, but do you actually understand it, what would you do if things do a little wrong, do you know how to get out of those trades successfully, do you know what the risk management of that system is and would you be able to properly and accurately explain it to someone should they need you to?
If the answer is no to any one of those questions then you should not be using that strategy, for the simple reason that you do not truly understand how it works to how to use it. Bob has probably spent the last six months learning and honing this strategy, he has an in-depth knowledge of it and knows exactly how it works.
So now you need to learn and develop things your way, the first thing you need to do in order to do this is to work out exactly how you prefer to learn, how do you best learn? Some people learn best by writing while others learn best by doing, you can incorporate either of these ways into your learning and development, but it is important to recognize this as if you do not learn well by just reading, then just reading will kill all motivation and may put you off trading altogether.
While there is nothing wrong with listening to others and seeing how they went on their learning journey, it is important that you don’t try to follow them step by step, for the simple reason that they are learning the way that they need to learn, and this won’t suit the majority of other people. Taking tips is fine, these can lead you in the right direction or get an understanding of what you need to learn, but how you learn it should be entirely up to you and should suit your own individual style.
So why is it important to make your own style and strategy, this is pretty simple too, if you create something from scratch, you have a full understanding of how it works, you know the methods behind it, you know how the risk management works and just as importantly, you know what to do if something goes wrong. We have seen thousands of traders lose their accounts because theta re trying to mimic another trader with a strategy that they just do not understand, creating one yourself gives you the knowledge that you need., Of course, you can take aspects from other strategies, but if you do that, learn what it is that you are taking, do not just blindly add it to your strategy.
One final tip we would also add, is that you need to be creating and learning on a demo account, we have seen a lot of new traders who are copying others jump straight in with a live account and they always end up blowing that account, the amount of value that you get from using a demo account is well worth the time that you put in, you can tweak, try out and develop things with no actual risk and in conditions that are similar (not exactly like) to the live trading environments, use the demo accounts as much as you can, especially when learning and developing your own strategy.
The moral of the story is to simply be yourself, and learn the way you need to learn, take ideas from others, but develop them into things yourself instead of just copying or trying to follow the footsteps of someone that has done it before. Just remember that just because it works for someone else, doesn’t mean it will work for you.
