When you think of the word entrepreneur, you may identify them as individuals who take on an assumed calculated risk to start a business in an attempt to become successful. While full time traders don’t directly create businesses that offer a particular good or service, traders need the same discipline, motivation and adaption to risk and other challenges along the road.
1. Any Venture is Risky
Entrepreneurs with the goal to start their own business will face the most difficult and often the most disabling element to achieving their endeavor. That challenge is overcoming the risk involved in starting your own business. No longer can you rely on the steady paycheck you have seen every couple weeks and no longer can you hold others accountable for your own financial status.
The risk factor is not something that I would suggest diving blindly into, mortgages, supporting a family and other debts can and should be an inhibitor to putting in your two week notice. Be sensible and weigh how much income you need to survive (not on the streets) and calculate what you would need to accomplish to make that happen. Be conservative with your figures as there is no method to predict the unpredictable.
Always wade into a new venture and dedicate any available free time to develop your craft to build a foundation to transition to. If you’re a new trader always begin with paper trading to establish your trading style and what you build confidence with. For more experienced traders looking to go full time, focus more on reliability and keep performance outliers to a minimum.
2. Maintaining Discipline
A trader, especially one full time and reliant on performing is an extremely demanding job and somebody without much discipline will have a tough time seeing success in this industry. Each trade must be methodical, researched and undoubtedly to you, the right move at the right time. Often times, traders will begin to get sloppy after they get seduced by previous success. When trades get sloppy, your risk grows exponentially and devastating mistakes can be made. Be sure to do your homework and be confident in your trades. Although you no longer have a nine to five, your day will be much longer researching, deciphering and searching for the next trade opportunity.
Maintaining methodical and rule based trading practice can help alleviate the stress and streamline your daily demands. Technical trading systems such as Ruby for NinjaTrader can provide a streamlined process to identifying trade opportunities.
3. Staying Confident
Successful entrepreneurs are the ones who can look you in the eye and with the utmost sincerity and say that they are confident that their idea will be successful. Traders must have the same mentality every day and on every trade. You must believe in yourself and your trading system, when you begin to doubt, or let the irrationality of your thought process override your rules, you will never succeed.
When market conditions are unfavorable or a trade has gone sour, you must stay confident and not go into “system-override mode.” You can, and should look back as to why it happened, but when you start blaming the markets for being wrong or irrational, you might have a problem. While the negative attitude exists, your head is not in the right place to make successful trades. Taking a break and letting your mind come back to center is the best defense against this attitude. Brash trades with a negative attitude will be your Kryptonite. The markets and new opportunities will always be there tomorrow.
4. Cherish Supporters and Value Pessimists
For any new venture, there will be two sides to every proposal and generally they are one of these two: The supporter who feels that this is a great opportunity and they will do whatever they can to support you and the pessimist who will outline every possible situation on how it may fail. Both sides have valuable wisdom.
The pessimists will often have genuine concerns, doubts and hurdles to think about. Sometimes the excitement of something new will blind you from seeing very real challenges that you will need to consider. The optimists will continue driving your passion and excitement. Embrace those who support you and take the advice of the nay-sayers without letting them slow you down or derail your dreams.
Traders will inevitably see a wide spectrum of varied success and failure stories from other traders. By maintaining proper practice in discipline and risk management you can put the odds in your favor to becoming another success story.
5. Motivation and Passion
Motivation and passion are almost synonymous however motivation has a distinct difference. Motivation is what keeps your eyes on the horizon and doing what is needed to keep tabs on everything to make great trades.
Keep setting the bar higher every day and never be content with where you are at. Keep on growing and be better every day.