There are many traders that are worried about how well other traders are doing. Or they are worried about how other traders may be learning faster or progressing faster. Or how some other traders have a better system than them.
I remember vividly how I wasn’t making much progress in trading and I would go on the forums and there would be people posting charts on how they caught a nice entry in a trade and made a killing. I would get angry at myself for missing the opportunity and angry at myself that I was not able to be at the same level as the other traders. I was constantly worried about how others traders were learning much faster than me and how they were absorbing the knowledge and progressing faster. It was a difficult period because I may have spent a few months learning something while some new trader on a forum just learned it within two weeks. I thought I had a some learning disability or that I was not cut out to be a trader because I could not learn the material fast enough.
Should I Just Quit Trading?
I was wondering whether I should just quit since all these newer people on the forum had learned in four months what it took me two years to learn. That was back when I was in the technical indicator and price action cycle. I figured if they could learn so much faster than me, then they would probably always have a bigger trading edge than me. I was constantly worried about the other traders instead of worrying more about improving myself and figuring out the foundations of every market – order flow and liquidity. Eventually I figured out that the traders on the forums can post as many charts as they want showing off as many great trades as they want. It didn’t matter what they showed, for as long as I have the order flow edge I would always be able to trade better than them. The inefficiencies and opportunities will always exist no matter how many people show off on the forums. I only discovered that revelation after making the order flow transformation.
As I went through the technical indicator and price action process there were weeks when I posted a decent profit. Eventually, while browsing the trading forums I would find someone else trading a different system who happened to make more money than me. Lets say I had a 5% return, but some other individual posted a 10% return. Since, I was still stuck in the state of worrying about the other traders having a better system than me, I would go back and thought that I had to incorporate some part of that system that performed better than mines into my own. I would go on the trading system hopping journey all over again. All my worrying led me to constantly try to optimize and find the next great technical indicator that was going to make me more money, or filter out a bad trade.
The constant worry about how other traders are doing better than you is very detrimental to rapid trading success. The reason is because you are constantly focusing on the other traders and how they view the market instead of working on improving your own mental model and trading philosophy.
The Best Order Flow Traders Think For Themselves
The best traders, the best order flow traders think for themselves.
That doesn’t mean they are not open minded or need to be isolated from the world. Quite the contrary. Many of them, especially macro traders love to be plugged into the order flow and information flow. All the top hedge fund managers love to talk to each other to get different views on various markets and get a feel for the positioning and bias of market participants.
They have developed the skill to assimilate information and then analyze that information through their own mental model, liquidity model, market model, and asking the right trading questions. Then they decide how that information can and if it should be used to place a trade, manage a trade, or liquidate a trade. They do not worry about how other traders may have made a killing or not. They worry more about managing the risk in their own portfolios and finding the trades that conform to their own system.
Stop worrying about other traders. Instead focus much more on what you can do. The human mind is an amazing thing as it can learn and hold a lot more information than you would expect.
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