I have been at the prop firm for a year now. With this month, I am ending the first year having gone through different phases, and a lot of positivity for the next year.

Here are the things I learnt this year, which I hope to strongly imbibe and carry forward to next year.

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1) Whenever we start trading any markets, success in the profession is based on

  • Finding your style
  • Finding your edge
  • Finding your zone

Style - positional / intraday / hybrid

Edge - technical/fundamental/quantitative or systematic

Zone - Working alone / as a team

2) Edges that can be found easily, will also vanish easily.

If you’re looking at something and thinking “wow this is an amazing trade”, so are millions of others.

That’s why it most likely won’t be an amazing trade, at least not as much as you think it would be.

3) Contrarian thinking is important.

When everyone around you, be it your team or traders around you, or people in your circle all have a unified call (long/short) on something, it’s time to be careful.

It’s also time to think of who is on the other side of that trade.

4) Risk management is of paramount importance.

Almost every trader I met is wrong more often than they’d like to admit. When they say something is a good long, it will go down. When they say something is a good short, it will go up.

But these guys make so much money despite. Why? Risk Management.

These guys I met are among the best risk managers.

They fully acknowledge that they won’t be right always, and work in such a way they capitalize on the instances they are right enough to compensate for the times they are wrong and some.

5) Professional traders use indicators.

Few people I have seen use moving averages, fibonacci, trendlines, patterns like head and shoulders, double top, double bottom, cup and saucer, and all those.

It’s what they use to align their biases with market.

6) If you make a mistake through your own analysis, it’s easier to fix.

If you make a mistake because of emotional blocks and issues, that’s also possible to fix.

But if you make mistake because you followed someone else’s trade/call/opinion, that’s not fixable. You’ll have to remember that even the best traders are right slightly more than 50% only.

For you to make money on the back of even the best trader, you have to do everything they do, exactly how they do. If you’re going to follow only one trade, that trade could very well be a loser in their portfolio.

They will make money elsewhere to compensate for it.

You won’t.

And, you can’t fix this either.

So, your mistakes have to be truly yours to be fixable.

7) Approaching growth in the market is a step by step process.

First you need product - trader fit.

Whichever product you choose to trade, it should fit your style and your methodology.

Let me elaborate. If you’re a positional trader, it’s quite hard to trade something that goes down and up 10% overnight.

On the other hand if you trade something that has rarely ever gone up or down more than 1% overnight, that’s a better fit to your style. So, it’s important to choose a product/market that fits your style and requirements.

It’s also important to understand the product’s behavior over the last 10 years at least, so that you know how it behaved in different market cycles.

8) Trading just for the sake of trading is dangerous.

You can’t be a machine gun.

You have to be like a sniper. You have to wait for the right setups to form, and then hit with proper execution.

If you get itchy hands, do something else - analysis or acquiring new skills.

9) Being around people and trading with a team of people can either work to your favor or against.

It all depends on how you thrive the best.

For me, I mostly thrive working alone or maybe with one person at most who has complementary skillset and contrasting viewpoints. So, I mostly don’t prefer to work as a team with multiple people, or discuss things, because that’s not how my mind works. I think it ultimately depends on the kind of people in the team. Maybe I just haven’t found such a team yet. It’s also hard to find. So, understand yourself first and then decide on how to approach the career - whether being a lone wolf or a team would work for you.

Depending on that, go ahead and get things done.

10) Growth as a trader comes only after we detach ourselves from money.

It sounds counter-intuitive.

If we view money as so important and attach ourselves, we’ll never let our full potential come out as a trader. Watching PNL swings throughout the day is the dumbest thing one can do, and even I have done it.

As you grow, it’s going to be the one major roadblock for you to cross. When you start, the PNL swing will be in $100’s.

Then it will be near $1000.

When it gets to $10k or above, that’s when the real game starts. Unless you have practiced not looking at PNL swings and just trading the market setups with required size and risk,

unless you look at the trades as number of ticks/points and not as $ per tick while you’re in the activity of trading, scaling up will be very hard.

11) Anyone and everyone can become successful as a trader.

If you have enough money to experiment with until you find your style, edge, zone, and you have the discipline, patience, perseverance and passion for it,

you can make it as a trader. The reason why most people don’t make it as a trader is because

a) They don’t have enough money to experiment with b) They had enough money which they blew up due to silly mistakes.

You have to survive in the game long enough to find your edge and thrive. So start small.

12) “Simple things work” is often quoted for markets in edges.

Maybe it’s true. If it is so simple, everyone would be doing it and then that edge will thin out and vanish. That’s what I find in the markets we trade.

Whenever there’s an exploitable edge, it gets taken out in few months, especially if it is a market with good liquidity.

Then you have to go fishing for another edge.

The process continues. You always have to be on your toes.

13) As markets mature, they get more and more efficient, and it gets harder and harder to find edges.

As a market gets crowded with more and more HFTs, the lower timeframes start getting noisier and noisier, and traders have to push themselves up the higher timeframes.

14) So, the key to finding an edge as a trader beginning in the markets is to find the first timeframe in the series of timeframes that has relatively lesser noise around the major price levels.

Then you go looking for edges with positive expectancy around them.

15) Markets are fractal in nature.

So, if an idea works in a particular product in a particular timeframe, there are chances that it could work better (and worse too) in other adjacent timeframes. So it’s important to look at such things too.

16) Finding a mentor is very hard.

Even then, someone wanting to mentor you is very very hard.

Traders who are better than you usually want to get bigger and better and won’t have time for you.

Not unless they get paid for it. Just because someone makes millions doesn’t mean we can expect them to have a good heart and spend their spare time for guiding us.

Coz, there is no upside or benefit in it for them.

If you can find a way to make it a significant enough win-win for them, you have a chance. Otherwise, you’re alone in this journey.

The sooner you realise it, the sooner you stop relying on anyone else, the faster you stop waiting for someone to rescue you, and the sooner your growth as a trader will start.

17) Everyone will have their opinions on what you can and cannot achieve.

But ALL those opinions are absolutely useless.

They may be traders who have achieved it all. They may be just people you know who don’t believe in you. They may also be colleagues in your office who think you’re wasting your time on this pursuit.

But think about it.

A seed which has been dormant in the room for over a year or two, when put inside soil and sprinkled with water for few days, sprouts with life.

That’s magic.

Miracles happen every day in front of us. Most of us are so numb and ignorant about the miracles happening in front of us that we think so small, we think so little of ourselves, for ourselves.

What anyone else thinks is possible for you is limited only by their limited minds. If you want, you can break out of all such opinions and judgements any time if you set your heart and mind onto something and work relentlessly towards it.

I know that and innately you know it too.

You can start today and change your life drastically.

18) There will always be those who are negative about something you take up.

There are some who are always speaking negatively around you “every week some trader goes bust, every week someone gets fired, every week someone leaves this field defeated” and stuff like that.

If you’re around such toxic people with limited minds, you will never flourish.

So the first thing you must do is keep far far away from such polluting talking-heads who have nothing better to do with their words, thinking, and mind.

It’s far better to be alone and work alone, than to be around such toxic, negative, and pessimistic people.

This field more than any other requires as much optimism as possible to back your hard work and patience for results.

Being negative will accelerate your downfall and thin out your patience, and you’ll be the guy in the bottom of this picture.



19) I have met a lot of traders in the last year.

Most of them are well educated, but almost none of them are well-read.

There’s a subtle difference that creates a night and day difference in life. Most traders have no clue of what happens outside their lives and have a one-dimensional personality.

A well-read person always has a mind and worldview much broader and better than a well-educated person.

So, read quality books.

Don’t limit your reading only to finance, investments, trading alone.

Get out of your comfort zone and read things that are unrelated to what you do in life.

After spending 2019 and 2020 reading only finance related stuff, I realised how boring I have become.

This year I picked up and read few books on neuroscience, psychology, human performance and potential, health, mind-body connectivity, gut health, food, exercise, etc.

That has helped me gain a much better understanding of myself, and the world around.

20) Try to spend 5-10 hours a week picking up a new skill.

As a trader we always have to keep our brain sharp and our mind is our foremost edge.

To do that, picking up a new skill - be it music, programming, language, anything - helps rewire our brain.

This process of rewiring our brain adds new neural connections, lights up neural pathways that have been dormant for years, and helps optimise our brain in a better manner.

This year I picked up video editing, teaching, table-tennis, bike riding, etc., which helped me a lot.

21) Have patience with yourself.

When you’re a trader, you’re surrounded by people who aren’t patient enough with you.

When you want to do it full time, even when the world around you is all chaotic, you must be able to center yourself and find your zone.

There should be a place in your mind you can visit and become calmer, more peaceful, rational, and centred, every single day.

Eating my morning breakfast (Apple, banana and peanut butter) with a cup of hot coffee is a ritual that helps me calm myself and satisfy my soul.

Find a ritual like that for yourself that gives you your moment of calm and zen to start your day.

And stick to that ritual through thick and thin. Let it be a healthy ritual too (not like smoking or whatever that’s injurious to health).

22) Spend time with nature, sunshine, and some time with your family members/friends who are supportive of you in this journey.

I am doing all this just so my parents, wife, my children can all have and afford a better life. Those are my roots.

You have to find yours.