Building Your Foundation

Q: Any tips for beginning traders?

A: Build your foundation.

In every sport, there's a few things you do that give you 80-90% of the rewards. Get really good at that BEFORE focusing on the minor things that give you that last 10-20%.

Example: In Tennis, you should immediately learn a forehand, backhand and serve. That'll account for 80-90% of your groundstrokes anyway. Would you be BETTER if you had... a good overhand, volley, and faster feet? Absolutely. But without the forehand, backhand and serve... you never get to use the others anyway.

Example (not sports): If you had a cup noodle. You would want to focus on.... the water, the dried noodles and the seasoning packet. That constitutes 80-90% of the taste. You could adjust and make the cup noodle better with say... an egg or additional toppings like seaweed, bamboo shoot, etc. but without the water, dried noodles and seasoning.. any additions aren't going to be doing much at all.

This is unironically where most people fail.

People will have traded for years and not have a good foundation because they have: no understanding of basics, poorly formed trade setups, no knowledge of why they're doing what they're doing (bc copying trades).

The secret is... stick with cementing that foundation even if it's "boring" because it is. There's nothing flashy about support and resistance. Nothing flashy about proper sizing or closing out trades that you're unsure of.

Similarly, there's nothing flashy about forehands or backhands (compared to a powerful overhead smash that gets the crowd excited).

But if you want to be elite, it's a rite of passage. You MUST get your trading basics (whatever that means for you) to be near instinctual. You're not having to actively think about how to execute. You just have a plan, and you know exactly how to get from Point A to Point B to Point C.

Until you can do that consistently, you need to keep building your foundation.