How I Got Consistent In Forex... (my journey)

This blog post will be a different one...

In the trading community, there's easy access to valuable trading advice, tips, and education (if you know how to filter the information).

However, there's a lack of "personality" in the information available. What I mean is that successful traders don't talk much about their own journeys; with what did they struggle the most, and how did they manage to solve their issues.

This is why I wanted to make a more personal blog post sharing part of my trading journey in the hope it will help you with yours.

I'll talk about the biggest obstacles I faced and how I overcame them.

Don't get me wrong! I still find obstacles in my trading. This is an endless process. But after these years, they no longer represent barriers but mere speed bumps.

We are all different traders and we all have different struggles. However, in trading, we tend to struggle with a lot of the same things because we share the same human nature.

Don't think I didn't struggle with exactly the same things you do.

I don't promise you success, but if you do the things I did to overcome your trading problems, I can guarantee you'll become a better trader, a better person, and, sooner or later, you'll see consistency... just like I did!

Let's start with the first obstacle I encountered that wasted a lot of my time...

1st Obstacle: "Where Do I Start?" Or Should I Say... "Where Do I Stop"?

The first stage of my trading journey seemed endless: the learning phase.

One of the strongest principles I hold in life is: If I get into something, I have to give 100% of myself. Not 80, not 90, 100%! Either it is or it isn't. So when I took the decision of learning to trade I knew I was ready to do everything in my reach to become profitable.

However, at the time, I had a completely wrong idea of what it was to give 100% of myself, at least in this new world of trading. Like many of you, I thought it meant learning the biggest amount of knowledge I could.

For more stupid this may sound, I thought there was an absolute truth for trading: the right way of reaching profitability and consistency. And that way implicated to know a lot of indicators and different patterns.

The first thing beginners are presented with when they start trading is technical analysis. So I started to dive really deep into it... so deep that I lost a great part of my time trying to fill an endless hole in my knowledge about the market.

I thought the more knowledge I could learn, the better of a trader I would be. After all, that was the way I was successful in college and in a couple of other skills. I had no idea that trading was something very different...

So the first obstacle of my journey was to realize when to STOP learning technical information.

At some point, I felt overwhelmed with so much information that it started to get obvious I couldn't cover it all. I would learn a strategy just to find another one that seemed better. I felt exhausted and that's when I realized there had to be something else...

I realized that more knowledge about the markets wouldn't make me a better trader. I also realized this was a performance skill.

Just like professional athletes focus on improving their performance, I realized I had to stop with the theory and use ONE strategy to adjust it along with the testing phase.

Lesson #1: Know when you should stop learning technical information. Get a mentor that can guide you in the technical part and start testing a simple strategy from the start.

The Price Action Trading Course is a great way to get started as it teaches you a simple way to analyze price by reading price action. It's a proven edge with a focus on probabilities.

2nd Obstacle: Listening to myself...

I then started to test my strategy and adjust it.

At the time, my mind was stuck in swing trading. Maybe because I saw more swing traders on social media so that created a certain pressure to become one as well.

I used to hear about the importance of patience all the time but I misunderstood its meaning: I insisted on a trading style that wasn't for me, thinking I wasn't being patient enough to hold positions for weeks when the truth was that swing trading just didn't fit my personality!

This is the second biggest obstacle I faced in my trading journey: insisting on a trading style that wasn't for me.

How did I overcome it?

Firstly, I realized I couldn't get comfortable with that style and started to question if I should trade on a lower time frame. Then, I realized how to listen to myself, my personality.

How did I do this?

I started to ask questions to myself about my personality and the way I used to deal with life situations.

I realized I'm a fast decision-maker so I'm just not the type of person that wants to hold a position for weeks. I like to make business fast and that means getting in and out of the market on the same day.

Once I finally adapted my swing strategy to day trading, my growth curve went parabolic. I instantly could see improvement not only in my trading results but in my emotions, comfortability, and even happiness when I was trading. It just made instant sense!

And the most fun part about this is that, after getting along with my day trading style, I was able to be okay with holding swing trades. I then found out how to transform a day trade into a swing trade to boost my risk to reward ratio. This is all explained in the Price Action Forex Course.

Lesson #2: Don't rely on all the information your trusted traders put online. In trading, there are a million ways of being profitable. Whenever you see a trader trying to tell you "there's only one single way...", stop listening.

Lesson #3: I thought doing sacrifices in order to become successful meant that I needed to make swing trading work. Once again, a huge misinterpretation. So my advice is: take time to know yourself. Give the right importance to your personality, don't try to suppress it. And most of all, don't try to be someone you aren't - be genuine because trading will reveal your personality like nothing else.

3rd Obstacle: My surroundings

One of my biggest obstacles was the environment and the people I had around me. They not only didn't believe in what I was doing but they didn't accept it.

This was something that, at the time, I thought wouldn't affect me because I had a strong desire after all... but the unconscious brain is another story, and facts are, it affected me a lot to be surrounded by people who would throw lower vibrations on me.

I knew what I had to do: distance myself from this discouraging environment. But that meant distancing from my family which was difficult for me also.

I lived in a constant struggle so I started to isolate myself in my corner doing my thing.

The more I studied and traded, the more confident I was about my strategy and the less other people's opinions affected me.

I started to talk with other traders online, ask advice from more experienced traders and get into free trading communities. All I was doing was to create an online environment that worked as an escape from my real life. This might sound wrong but at the time, it was what gave me confidence and the motivation to keep going.

The point is: I took control over my environment and that made a huge difference in my process.

Lesson #4: You own control over your surroundings, your behavior, and even your thoughts! You just don't know it yet. Trading makes you realize this power and once you feel it, nobody can stop you!

4th Obstacle: FOMO, How To Handle?

Humans associate bigger pain with a missed opportunity than with a loss.

I'm no different. I experienced FOMO at the beginning of my journey just like you.

This is the most common fear and the hardest to overcome for many reasons.

Let's talk about how did I overcame it and how you can do the same.

3 things:

• Solid strategy

• Confidence

• Experience

Let's put this clear for everyone guys: you need to develop your psychological skills in this game... We all can agree with that... But you need a strong base for that! That base is a SOLID strategy! With no base, there's no top!

A solid strategy means you can say with confidence: "My confluences are this, this, this and that and when they appear on the chart they leave absolutely NO DOUBT to if I should enter or not". If you can't say this yet, then you don't have a solid strategy.

How did I overcome it?

So the first thing I did to solve this FOMO was to get rid of doubt in my strategy. In my journal, I have all my confluences written and in every single trade, I make sure to check each one of them and write some comments if needed.

The second thing I knew I needed to build was confidence. At the time, I had a strategy but I didn't have the necessary confidence to execute it flawlessly.

Until I didn't get confidence in my strategy to be okay with missing a move, I knew it would be impossible to solve the FOMO problem. So I started to backtest my system, collect data about my setup, study my trades, journal everything I could and perfect my performance. These are the things that will give you confidence too in your strategy.

The third and final thing is experience. This is something you can't rush!

The one thing I wanna tell you regarding experience is: There are 2 types of experience - empty experience and rich experience.

• Empty experience is when you hold the same habits and attitude towards trading and let the years pass by. Nothing changes and your trading results go nowhere. Maybe you learned one thing or another but not enough to get you consistent.

• Rich experience is when you do what it takes: the work behind the scenes; you get to know yourself and change, you want it bad enough so you do everything in your reach to become a better trader. This experience is the one that gets you further because is followed with the right mindset. If this is the type of experience you feed, your trading journey gets considerably shortened.

Lesson #5: It's not because you spend more time in front of the charts that you gonna become a better trader. There are no miracles. Get that strategy tested, make that trading journal, write down that loss, note those emotions, do that backtesting, practice awareness and mindfulness. Work on your patience, confidence, and discipline outside of trading and you'll see everything fall into place!

Conclusion

I did struggle with a lot more than my learning phase, my trading style, my surroundings, and FOMO, but these were the most difficult ones for me!

The most important thing I learned was that there's always a solution if you want to!

My advice for you is:

• Don't rush the process because it will have the opposite effect on you;

• Results aren't necessarily money! In trading, your change in attitude, mindset, habits, and performance should be seen as results too;

• Make sure to create a habit system that leads you to your goals. If you can ingrain the right habits, it's a matter of time until you succeed.

That's it, guys!

I hope this post helped you somehow...

Have a great trading week,