Trading as career can be viewed both as a business and as skilled work at the same time. Trading is like doing business. Capital is needed to start. Traders analyze and make decisions based market conditions, take risk, evaluate results, and make adjustments for improvement. On the other side, trading is also a skill. Traders, especially new ones, need to learn how to analyze the market and develop their own way or style of entering and exiting the market. Like any skilled work, reading books and learning from mentors is only the start. The bulk of learning comes from repeated effective practice and discipline.
In light of this idea, we should approach our trading career as both a business as well as skilled work. At first, a good foundation of knowledge should be built. There are many books and courses available both online and offline. In addition, there are many traders that we can follow and seek advice from (regarding choosing the right materials and mentor to follow; let's leave that for another article). Before investing and trading a significant amount of money, we have to understand that this is also skilled work. That means, even though we spend countless hours learning how to trade the market, we still need to spend another set of countless hours, practicing this skill in order to be consistently profitable. As we practice, we specify and define our business demographics. How much should we invest? How much are we willing to risk? What types of analysis should we use? How do we enter and exit the market? Which broker should I choose? We answer all those questions and practice based on what we've decided. We can practice through a demo account and/or a small live account. Make good use of every failure and loss that we encounter as this will be our tools for further improvement. Once we achieve consistent profitability, we can slowly increase our capital while continuously adapting to the ever-changing market conditions.
This is one of the reasons why trading as a career can be difficult. We assume multiple tasks and must be proficient in all of them to be able to successful. Never forget that PAFTI, our trading community, is full of traders who have gone through and currently going through the same journey as you are. Take advantage of all our educational materials, trade ideas, and access to fellow traders that we have in the community. Hope this helps our new traders. See you in our Discord group and live sessions.