How To Trade Like An Expert

- Petri Redelinghuys

The market is a wild and unforgiving beast. Over the years that I have been involved with markets, I’ve seen a rather alarming number of traders get viciously chewed up and spat out indiscriminately by it.

The market doesn’t care who you are, how smart you are, what your background is and what you believe you are entitled to. The market only trades and it handsomely rewards those who get it right. And it leaves those who get it wrong by the side of the road. There is no middle ground, there is no discrimination. You are either right, or you are wrong. And price relative to your position is the only thing that determines this.

So now that the scary stuff is out of the way, there is some good news. Every single person can become a trader. As mentioned above, the market does not care if you are smart or well educated, it treats us all the same.

This means that each one of us has an equal opportunity to become a great trader. The stock market is probably the only great frontier left in which someone can start with almost nothing and literally make millions.

Trading is a skillset that can be learnt and practised over time. The trick to becoming a great trader is very simple: just survive the learning period.

Over the years that I have been actively involved in markets, I have been fortunate enough to learn some invaluable lessons, both firsthand and from several great mentors. Even though there are probably enough lessons to fill an entire encyclopedia, I find the following lessons to be some of the more important ones for traders at pretty much any stage of their trading careers.

1. Becoming a great trader takes longer than you think