Success in Forex : It’s Not Only About Effort

A study done a few years ago – sorry can’t really remember the university – researched differences in the success of different music students by looking at a wide variety of factors. They succeeded in finding that the most successful students – the ones who made it further and had more proficiency – simply had more practice around what they were doing. This study pointed out that about 10K hours of work were needed to breach the average-to-virtuous limit since most students who were brilliant had simply done a much larger effort. This then became extrapolated to other areas in life and became a so-called “rule of thumb” for getting success in something you want to do. However – when it comes to trading – effort is not something that can singly predict the success of a new retail trader. On today’s post I will look at why effort is not enough, when it can be counter-productive and how you can ensure that your effort will truly pay off in the longer term.

This is another extremely popular recommendation you can see on forums and forex learning websites : “do the hard work”. This demands new traders to learn from the markets and create their own strategies based on their own efforts and hours of hard work. The problem here – and why more often than not this effort is futile – is that there is no standard way of learning forex trading at the retail level. The lack standardization leads to a great problem since effort can be easily misdirected and yield extremely bad results.

Let us for example compare the success of a musician to the success of a trader. If you want to learn to play any instrument – I play bass, harmonica and guitar myself by the way – you can simply follow well standardized methods of learning that take you in steps from ” I don’t know a thing” to “I am a good guitar player”. Certainly this road takes effort but the most important thing here is that a clear road map is present. In trading at the retail level there is no road map, no guide with clear steps, no clear and defined steps that tell you how efforts should be focused.

The absence of a road map is dangerous because it leads to the fact that each trader has to create his or her own road map to truly learn what needs to be done. Now- since this is like asking yourself for directions for a place you don’t know – people usually go to others on the internet, asking for their advice on this matter. This is the equivalent of asking anyone – without knowing if they ever got to where you want to go in the first place – for directions. This is truly why a mentor is so important in trading, you get a clear road map to know where you want to go.

The efforts of new traders are therefore based on a road map which is almost never clear, often created from the stitched-together parts of other traders half-baked solutions and “road-trips”. What you get is a person who puts a lot of effort by traveling to many “places” where there is no way out or “dark and dangerous alleys” where financial ruin sadly awaits. Obviously, if you don’t have a road map to get from Los Angeles to New York and you are told to get there you could eventually arrive through extensive trial and error (what most traders have to go through), but there is actually a chance – and a big one I might add – that a new trader will simply never becomeĀ  a profitable one.

Therefore, effort in forex is simply not enough to succeed. You need two things: the willingness to put a large amount of effort and a clear road map that tells you how to focus this effort to be successful. You need a single road map from someone you fully trust and know to be successful – or alternatively you need to choose one if you are lucky enough to have many from many you trust – and you need to put up the effort to get there.

Walking the roads of forex without a true guide towards success, putting tons of hours of effort to build your own map is a sure way to have a much smaller chance of success coupled with a great chance of getting lost and achieving no profitability after a long amount of time. I know people who have tried forex trading for 10-15 years without achieving even a single year of profit, why? Their efforts are not focused, they are not based on a good road map. If you would like to learn more about mechanical trading and how you too can learn to trade using systems with clear rules and realistic profit and draw down expectations please consider joining Asirikuy.com, a website filled with educational videos, trading systems, development and a sound, honest and transparent approach to automated trading in general . I hope you enjoyed this article ! :o)

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