Note: The back story behind the question below is a 27-year-old man whose family is pressing him to quit trading and go to college for a “real” education.
Question:
I love the markets and I want to trade for the rest of my life. I’ve seen several older colleagues with successful runs in other professions (lawyers, dentist, doctors etc) with years of experience in their field, but eventually they come to trading the markets, and I ask myself, “Isn’t it better to come straight to trading markets and save some years of my life?” I am not really seeking extreme wealth… I just want to do something that I love until the day I can’t breathe anymore.
Ken from College town
Answer:
Ken, your question touches the line between general investing advice and counseling, but within it is an important nugget of general investing advice, and that is what I will address. Perhaps from my answer, you might glean something to help you in your decisions.
No matter what one chooses to do in life, if passion is not involved, the outcome will at best be mediocre and at worst be failure. Trading is no different. Enjoying trading goes a long way toward achieving success. Keep in mind, though, passion is not the only thing you need to achieve trading success. It may actually hurt, if it is all that you have.
To be successful at trading, you need to be smart. By smart, I don’t mean you need to be able to compute the third side of an isosceles triangle. I mean you need to be able to think, to analyze, and to act with reason. You need to be able to take vast quantities of conflicting information from “reliable” sources and then find the “truth.” True, intuition plays an important role, but intuition is simply an unasked for conclusion that arises from experience and knowledge, both of which can come from just doing a certain thing (trading) for a long period of time. Intuition can also come if you formally train your mind to analyze and reason. Formally training your mind can reduce the time one needs to get to that place where intuition is the sorting mechanism one uses to get through the babble and flow of information surrounding all the markets.
I am no genius. In fact, my academic career depicts an average thinker. That is not important. Many reasons exist for the results of my formal training. The important point is that I have a lengthy academic career. Through all those years of work, I didn’t understand the value. In fact, many times I asked myself why am I doing this? But I did do it, and I am so fortunate that I stuck with it. You see that formal “mind training” is the basis of any success I have in my life, including the building of whatever wealth I have. But this is me. I can’t speak to what an education might do, or not do for you, but you should consider what I have told you today. That would be a smart thing.
Trade in the day; invest in your life …
