Hello Traders! This week’s Lessons From the Pros article has one primary goal – to teach you patience. I was talking to my brother a few days ago, who believe it or not is also trading the foreign currency market. While not a full time trader (yet!), we were discussing his strategy of going for just a few pips a day, almost scalping the market. Traditionally scalpers will be trading frequently – perhaps dozens of times throughout the day going for 5 to 10 to 20 pips at a time, but his style is to only trade 1 or 2 times with a goal of making 10-20 pips.
I expressed my “concern” that he is probably leaving a lot of money on the table, that he should let his winners run much longer with some of the extra volatility that the market has been giving us recently. His response to me was “I’m just trying to eat the elephant.” Seeing the puzzled look on my face, a more detailed explanation followed. Here is our conversation, paraphrased:
Brother: Have you ever tried to eat an elephant?
Me: That would be a “no”.
If you ever did, how would you do it? At one huge meal, or a couple of bites at a time over weeks, months, or years?
Definitely over weeks or months.
That is my long term goal. To me, the elephant is growing my trading account to be elephant-sized over weeks and months and years instead… Continue Reading
