Striking Out Alone With Your Trading Career

If you are going to survive in day trading, you need be one tough individual. You need to be self reliant and maintain enough promise to your own welfare to know the ins and outs of how to be individualistic enough to succeed. Often you need to be developing your own compass, charting your own territory and developing your own leads. If you need the chronic approval of other people, you aren't likely to make it in the world of financial trading.

People often make decisions based on the opinions and actions of others. Traveling in packs is natural, almost every wild animal forms some form of pack to help ensure its safety and survival in a rough world. Humans do the same, learning from the rest of the crowd was has been deemed "safe" and what has not. Thus when we make decisions in our lives as traders, we tend to feel safer when we follow the crowd and hang with the pack.

This is not however, generally considered the most profitable approach. Many investors handle their lives in mediocrity. There is a safe and pretty assured return in many of the trades that are done with the blessings of our peers. Yet the profitable trades are the ones that ask us to move beyond our comfort zone and stretch out into the world without the protection of the rest of the pack.

We have always been taught to go with the crowd, be part of the "in" crowd, follow the group, don't stand out, and by God by all means you must be normal. Striking out on our own and making decisions that are completely different from our safety pack can make us feel different enough to be ill. Fortunately, it doesn't need to be that way. You can develop the skills and self confidence to strike out on your own, trade with the big kids, and not worry about the impression that someone else has about our decision. It takes a little time and a dedicated effort, but it can be done. When it is done, and done well, often the results are absolutely mind blowing.

When you develop a sense of self esteem as related to your trading decisions, you can strike out with confidence. Of course, not every decision you make against the grain is going to be a huge winner, but those that you succeed with are going to help you make your mark.

One of the biggest drawbacks of going with the crowd is that you lose your ability to decide for yourself whether the trades you are making are definitely in your best interest. What might be in someone else's best interest may not be in yours. And that's okay. Neither one of you have to be wrong, just different. When we follow the crowd we lose our own sense of judgment, we even start to think like others when perhaps originally we came to the game with an entirely different thought process.

Is it important to listen to others and learn from their mistakes and their experiences? Absolutely. Does that mean you should follow them blindly no matter what our instincts tell us? Of course not. We are growing individuals with different plans, goals, strategies, and desires. Unless you are making choices for yourself you start to become a victim of the trading industry and it won't be long before you find that you are becoming disgruntled.

Going with the crowd often means that you are a little bit behind. Unless you become your own trend setter, you have to wait for the trend to develop. By then, the trend has nearly passed you by. Leaving enough time to wait for the majority to hurry up and act so that you know what to do leaves the doors open for a missed opportunity. When you decide for yourself and make decisions based on the information you have and the best interest of your account balance, you get to become the trend setter. And that is almost always much more profitable.