Hard or Easy – Your Choice
Trading is unique among professions in that you get to build your job description. You can trade any market over any time frame using any system. You can decide whether you want to make trading hard or whether you want to make it easy.
Unfortunately, most people opt to complicate it. They do this through a variety of mechanisms, such as trading markets they are not suited to, trading too short a time frame, or failing to understand the role of psychology in trading. This raises the question of why traders do so, given that trading has only three rules.
1. If it is trending up, you buy it.
2. If it is trending down, you sell it.
3. Don’t bet the farm.
The simple answer is that they make it hard because they want to. Sometimes, through ignorance, they don’t want to seek guidance that would make their lives easier and shorten their journey. They do this because of ego. And this leads us to the main reason why people make it more complicated than it should be – their egos.
Trading is an extension of our profiles with all their insecurities and vulnerabilities. Ego-based traders want to convince themselves that they are doing something difficult – something no one else could understand. As such, they build systems that are largely incomprehensible to others and are not designed to generate clarity by filtering signal from noise; instead, they add to the noise. All for the sake of their ego.
Hard or easy, simple or complex – it’s your choice.
