I have spent more than six years in the markets now, and if someone had asked me five years ago what you actually need to do to trade well, my answer would have been completely different from what it is today. I would probably have started talking about strategy, entries, market structure, risk-to-reward, sessions, confirmations and all the other things traders love discussing because they make trading feel like something you can eventually solve if you just collect enough knowledge.
The strange thing is that after thousands of hours looking at charts, hundreds of trades, managing more money than I ever expected when I started and going through periods where I felt completely in control followed by periods where seemingly nothing worked, I don’t think trading well has that much to do with knowing more anymore. In fact, some of the biggest improvements in my trading came when I started doing the exact opposite: analyzing less, making fewer decisions and deliberately removing things I once thought were necessary.
There is also something fundamentally broken about the way we learn to trade. The market can reward a terrible decision with thousands of dollars and punish a perfect decision five times in a row, which means that if you judge yourself the way your brain naturally wants to, you can literally become a worse trader while believing you’re improving. Psychology and behavioral-finance research gives us some interesting clues about why this happens, but it took me years of actually trading to understand what it means in practice.
And that eventually changed the question I ask myself completely. I stopped being so interested in “How do I make more money from trading?” and became much more interested in “What does it actually mean to trade well?” The difference sounds almost pointless until you understand it, but I think it is one of the most important distinctions I’ve learned in six years of doing this.