Buk said:
dbp - why do you think 'not many people can succeed with it'?? !
I was referring to what nbo said. But it's confirmed by my own experience.
Part of it may have to do with intelligence. Some people are just too stupid to get it. But these are a very small minority.
Most fail because of a seemingly infinite varitety of self-destructive qualities. There are people on ET who have gone through as much as $150,000.00 looking for a system, a method, a strategy. And they're not new. One guy has been at this for five years, yet only recently has -- as a result of my nagging -- begun to develop a trading plan. Another has 20 years' experience, part of it as a broker, yet blew $50,000.00 on advisory services. But why do people waste their lives on drugs, or unsafe sex, or adulterous relationships, or careers for which they have absolutely no aptitude whatsoever?
I've said that trading, though simple, is difficult, and that's not entirely accurate. What I should say is that a great many people find it to be difficult, which is not quite the same thing. A great many people consider alpine skiing to be difficult. Is it? Many years ago, when I was living in Colorado, I took my 5-year-old niece and my brother-in-law skiing. My niece had no difficulty at all, from the moment she snapped her bindings shut. My brother-in-law couldn't stay on his feet for more than a count of ten. So where lies the problem (and, no, it wasn't the instruction)?
Take patience. It is simply beyond the capacity of a great many traders to be patient. To wait. To sit on their hands until the right setup comes along. Even while they're trading, they know that they shouldn't be trading. And yet they trade anyway. Is this because trading is "difficult"? Or is it because of something that's missing within themselves? Or something that's there that shouldn't be there?
Most traders would be wildly successful if they would just get out of their own way. But many of them just won't. Many of them can't.
Which is why I can't get too excited about some "simple system" that somebody comes up with (which is generally more than a hundred years old) and which requires nothing more of the trader than to "follow the instructions".